IT outsourcer Unisys West has secured a deal with Newmont Australia Limited, the wholly owned subsidiary of the world’s largest gold miner, Newmont Mining Corporation.
IT outsourcer Unisys West has secured a deal with Newmont Australia Limited, the wholly owned subsidiary of the world’s largest gold miner, Newmont Mining Corporation.
While remaining tight-lipped on the value of the deal, Unisys West CEO Murray Rosa said the deal was worth “millions” to the IT services firm over two years.
News of the deal follows a similar, albeit larger, deal earlier this year with diversified global resources company WMC Resources.
Under the terms of the Newmont contract, the gold miner moved its IT services from Adelaide – where the company is based – to Perth. Those services went live on Monday last week.
Unisys will also provide a range of desktop and help-desk services, along with data centre services through its Leederville-based data centre.
Newmont Australia spokeswoman Danielle Martin said the deal was arranged through Newmont’s global IT partner Accenture.
Ms Martin said the deal allowed Newmont to consolidate two of its Adelaide offices and was “quite a mutually beneficial arrangement”.
“Over a two-year period it would provide a 20 to 30 per cent saving in outsourcing as opposed to keeping the IT services in house,” she said.
“It allows our IT people to concentrate on a strategic role while getting expert IT services.”
The WMC deal, worth $24 million ($US18 million) over three years to Unisys West, was an information technology infrastructure outsourcing contract.
Under the terms of the WMC contract, Unisys West will provide all IT management and support services for Western Australian and international operations, including its subsidiaries.
Unisys West is also responsible for coordinating the provision of service internationally by Unisys Corp and its subsidiaries and distributors worldwide, including service to WMC’s global locations in the US, China, Canada and Mozambique. These services include desktop, server and network management, as well as the associated help-desk support for these services.
At the time of the deal, Mr Rosa said it represented a “Trojan horse” into the resources sector and that the company was in discussions with other organisations in the resources sector that could be worth up to $100 million.
Mr Rosa said the migration of WMC’s IT services to Unisys West “has gone extremely well” and that Unisys West was continuing discussions with other resource companies on the back of the Newmont and WMC Resources contracts.
Mr Rosa said Unisys West employed a further 80 staff since January this year, taking the number of WA-based staff to more than 300, to service a growing number of contracts.
Mr Rosa said Unisys West would also continue to focus on securing large government contracts.
“FRIT [Functional Review Implementation Team] is very much in our radar and we are certainly keen to secure more government contracts,” he said.
“ITO [IT Outsourcing] activity and BPO [Business Process Outsourcing] activity is continuing to be a major source of revenue for the company.”
FRIT was formed in early 2003 by the State Government to address recommendations contained in the Functional Review Taskforce report to initiate reforms for the more effective delivery of corporate services and procurement across all government agencies.
Established in September 2000, Unisys West was created through a joint venture between BankWest and Unisys to create a WA-based IT services company.
These services include data centre outsourcing, network management, business-to-business e-commerce transaction services, business process outsourcing, help-desk operations, disaster recovery services and managed services.
The company has been active in the area of State government sector outsourcing, winning lucrative contracts with the WA Department of Education and Training, the WA Department of Justice, and a $14 million three-year deal with the Department of Land Administration.
