NSW's RailCorp has put out a call to third parties interested in keeping a watchful eye on its ICT outsourcing contract with Fujitsu.

The intended aim for the winning contractor is to provide benchmarks to ensure the train services and infrastructure provider is getting enough bang for buck on its IT investment with Fujitsu.

Contractors have until this Wednesday to submit tenders.

According to RailCorp spokesperson, John Millar, this external benchmarking activity was part of the original Fujitsu contract agreement. "RailCorp is merely conducting due diligence in contract management," he said.

In 2006 RailCorp selected Fujitsu Australia to maintain its ICT infrastructure services in a three year deal, with an additional two one-year options to extend. The formal contract start date was 8 January 2007.

Part of its outsourcing agreement with Fujitsu is the annual benchmarking of each of its three selected 'service towers':

"The benchmarking exercise will provide the foundation for an overall view of service levels and price of the selected service tower and is part of RailCorp's assessment of price and service-level effectiveness of Fujitsu's service delivery function," according to the tender documents.

The first benchmark, to begin this year, will be of its centralised Computing Service tower. This features RailCorp's data centres; database and middleware services; SAN, NAS, backup and restore; and server services for Unix and Wintel based infrastructure.

Next year, the winning contractor will benchmark the Distributed Computing tower, which includes workstation services (desktop computers, laptops, printers, and PDAs); desktop applications; and remote access services. The final benchmark will be of the Network Services tower, which mainly consist of its WAN services.

However, the Network Services tower will only proceed if RailCorp is satisfied after the first two years of the contract and is satisfied it has received "value for money" from Fujitsu.

It is believed RailCorp expects the benchmarking service provider to deliver a report within 50 days from winning the contract.