Global IT company Atos expects to triple the size of its Western Australian workforce after being awarded one of the state government’s largest ICT contracts.
Under a $124 million, five-year contract, Atos will assist the Department of Health shift from its current ICT infrastructure supplied by Fujitsu Australia to a new hybrid multi-cloud ICT platform.
The scope of services will encompass a mix of private and public cloud platforms, with co-location and managed services for 2,000 servers and more than 1,000 applications.
The change is designed to assist the department move to a recurrent consumption model that scales and shrinks as its computing requirements change over time.
The pay-as-you-go model means Health will need to undertake less capital expenditure on ICT equipment.
The new contract is part of the state government’s GovNext ICT program, which was launched with the goal of making big savings in ICT procurement costs.
France-based Atos, along with NEC Australia and Datacom Systems AU, were selected in 2017 as preferred suppliers of ICT ‘infrastructure as a service’ to the government for five years.
Shirley Ngu, head of information and data management for Atos in Australia, said the firm already had about 80 people in WA and she anticipated rapid growth.
Ms Ngu said the firm would double its WA headcount over the coming year with potential for threefold growth beyond that.
Atos planned to transfer some staff from other offices to bring its global capability into the WA market, and would also be recruiting locally and upskilling local people.
Its data centre partners for the Health contract will be Australian company NEXTDC and global player Equinix.
Australian firm Planit Testing has been engaged as its testing and release management partner.
Its cloud partners will be Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS.
Ms Ngu said WA Health was a highly valued and strategic client.
“Over several years, Atos has developed a reputation within the government marketplace for our success of transforming key services and infrastructure workloads into the cloud,” she said.
“We look forward to working with the government and WA Health on their new digital journey improving healthcare services."
The Health contract with be Atos' second investment in an enterprise grade cloud platform in WA; four years ago, it was contracted to migrate Edith Cowan University’s central IT infrastructure to the cloud.
Holger Kaufmann, chief information officer at WA Health’s shared service centre, known as Health Support Services, said the HealthNext transition program represented an opportunity to improve the way ICT services were delivered.
“A modern and contemporary cloud-based ICT system will enable us to respond better to innovation that will help improve patient care and reduce unnecessary duplication,” Mr Kaufmann said.
Planit Testing's WA based director of operations Andrew White said the firm has been committed to the WA market since 2012, providing Quality Engineering services to a multitude of clients.
"We are WA’s only independent provider of Quality Engineering services and as such we are fastidious when deciding who we partner with, even more so when it’s into key public services such as Health," Mr White said.
"Atos has an excellent reputation and we are extremely excited to be engaged with them to combine our Quality Engineering expertise locally with their wealth of experience on this exciting project."
The technical scope of the contract was summarised in a statement, as follows.
The Fully Managed Oracle customer environment will be supported by both Oracle and Exadata cloud machines orchestrated into an Atos Hybrid cloud environment hosted on an Extreme Performance Pod, Digital Private Cloud utilizing Atos' powerful BullSequana computing platform and supported by a suite of fully managed services. These services include data center housing, capacity management, monitoring and reporting, backup, disaster recovery and OS management.
The Atos Managed Public Cloud (MPC) solution, leveraging an Atos-managed ServiceNow platform, provides a single "pane of glass" for cloud consumption. MPC provides additional virtual infrastructures and operating systems to facilitate the consumption of public cloud environments, removing the burden for HSS to operate these infrastructures as well as OS, backup, DR, routing, firewall and communications dependencies. In addition, WA Health will gain governance over cloud consumption, security and compliancy.
