In an announcement promising to bring joy to the lives of Sun employees as well as Fujitsu, the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority has signed a two-year infrastructure outsourcing deal with Fujitsu that includes a migration path to two Sun e6900 servers.

The deal with Fujitsu is to manage the data centre and IT operations for the entire state and includes an option to extend the contract for another two years.

Fujitsu has held the current contract for data centre services within the NSW RTA since 1997.

The contract, valued in the range of tens of millions of dollars, according to NSW RTA chief information officer Greg Carvouni, includes migrating back-end RTA operations for the DRIVES information management system for vehicle licensing and registration to two Sun E6900 servers from the E1000.

The DRIVES system manages the records of 4.5 million drivers and registrations, which 1500 people use each day with an average transaction time of 0.3 seconds.

Carvouni said the deal is not an extension of an old contract but a completely new agreement in terms of service levels.

"We went to tender late in 2003 and awarded the contract in late 2004 and have been in transition ever since," Carvouni said.

"We wanted to get out of the old data centre, which we did in January and the next step was the transition to a new generation of servers to run applications, which we will be doing in June and July as part of this contract.

"It is a contract for full managed services [covering items] such as application response time and performance. We started life on a Fujitsu mainframe 10 years ago, migrated to Sun E1000 and now to the E6900. We will be finished by mid-year - the planning is complete."

Carvouni added that the annual cost of the contract will - hopefully - stay at the same level as the previous contract.

"On one hand you have growth and the other IT efficiency so as the two balance each other out, you have a significant contract."

Under the contract, Fujitsu will host about 800 applications for the RTA from two data centres located in Sydney. Applications include the information management system for vehicle licensing and registration, the Integrated Management System for RTA business operations, the Property information and Management System and the Road Information Systems. Fujitsu will also manage the RTA's IT network and registry office operations, which includes some 5500 desktops in 220 locations.

In April 2004 the RTA surprised many by choosing Apple g4 iMac desktops for its registry offices over PCs, citing easier application integration in the Mac's Unix-based operating system as a key reason.