The high cost of Defence IT spending revealed

New tool shows tens of millions spent on IT by Defence in just one month

Defence is known to be a big spender on IT, but just how much it does spend is now available to the public through a new web-based tool.

The tool allows users to break down Defence contract spending by month between 1997 and 2009.

A sampling of the expenditure only on IT contracts for the month of January 2009 reveals this shopping list:

  • $6.9 million paid to IBM Australia for technical support ($6.04 million) and WebSphere licences ($48,579).

  • The company also picked up a further $1 million for other software and server infrastructure during the month.

  • Optus was paid $2.45 million for Satellite services.

  • Savi Technology was paid $2.66 million for RFID licence maintenance support.

  • Southeren Cross Computing picked up some $3.46 million in business for financial systems and other services.

  • Ricoh Finance received $1.69 million for the supply and maintenance of high speed printing equipment

  • Kaz picked up $1.49 million for professional services and other services.

  • UXC, working on Defence’s personnel management key solution (PMKeyS), picked up $1.17 million

  • CSC picked up $1.3 million for financial systems and other support.

  • Dimension Data received $0.95 million for communications equipment.

  • Symantec Asia Pacific got $0.83 million for support and maintenance for existing storage software

  • $0.6 million was paid to Getronics for computer equipment.

  • The supply of professional services was also lucrative with $0.4 million going to Oakton, $0.4 million to EMC, and $0.37 million to EDS.

The revelation in Defence spending follows the announcement in February that Defence had awarded a $51 million contract for the provision of command and control systems support services to Thales Australia.

More about: CSC, Dimension Data, EDS, EMC, Getronics, IBM, IBM Australia, Optus, Ricoh, Symantec
References show all

Comments

1

Judy Hurditch, Director, Intermedium

Tue 09/03/2010 - 14:26

As always, beware of anything that is free. The AusTender database is a great resource. However, there are traps for the unwary.

Contracts are sometimes posted more than once, and for varying amounts (ie one contract being a correction for the previous one, which is not removed); amounts can be mis-keyed (often with too many zeros added); and supplier names can vary to such a degree that the full amount of business transacted with the supplier will not be apparent. The results that will be obtained by this free tool will be misleading in some instances because of these issues.

To use AusTender data to its full extent requires data cleansing, removal of duplicate contracts and supplier name 'cleansing', all of which Intermedium has been doing for the last 6 years so that it is able to provide the Australian IT industry and government agencies with reliable results from this rich source of data.

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