NSW govt in massive ERP consolidation

update The NSW Department of Services, Technology and Administration (formerly the Department of Commerce) is currently engaged in a plan to consolidate the State Government's numerous enterprise resource planning (ERP) software platforms into one shared service, according to HP.

"The department is implementing a shared service for ERP that will eventually cover every department in NSW," Martin Kenny, manager of Business Critical Systems for HP South Pacific, told ZDNet.com.au. The number of users was expected to grow to "several thousand" as more departments came online, he added.

The comments came after a statement by the vendor issued yesterday morning, which noted HP would provide the underlying hardware platform migration. The department was unable to immediately provide more details, but the project is believed to be based on software from German giant SAP.

HP will migrate the department's two existing ERP systems into a single hardware platform, running on HP Integrity rx8460 Itanium servers and HP StorageWorks XP24000 storage. The technology firm will also build a disaster recovery facility. The implementation will include HP Global Instant Capacity on Demand (GiCAP) Software, which will allow the NSW Government to activate additional capacity as required.

"The instant capacity allows them to start small and only pay for extra capacity as they need it," said Kenny.

This initiative follows the NSW Government's call in October for expressions of interest from the information technology industry to consolidate its data processing and storage. Minister for Commerce Jodi McKay said the government would look to build two dedicated datacentres by 2011. The government currently uses 130 datacentres in total and is looking to combine up to 55 of them into the new centres.

The new facilities would house IT systems for NSW Health, the NSW Department of Education and up to 30 other government agencies, according to the Expression of Interest document.