IBM is a surprising no-show in a multimillion-dollar outsourcing tender issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.
CIO Stewart Watson won’t name the five respondents under evaluation but confirms that IBM was not among them. It’s surprising, because IBM subsidiary Logical CSI had recently won the business to upgrade MAF’s network. IBM also chose not to respond some time back to the massive Fonterra outsourcing contract.
Watson says there were seven respondents but two didn’t make the formal evaluation because their documentation was incomplete.
The full infrastructural outsourcing contract is for three years, with a renewal clause, and is expected to be worth around $3 million a year. It may extend the scope of the services currently being provided to MAF by Gen-i, and some work at present being done inside MAF may be newly outsourced, but that depends entirely on the character of the responses and subsequent negotiation, says MAF procurement representative Tony Wood.
The services that may not be included in the deal are listed as “optional” in the request-for-proposal document and comprise: asset management, Linux and Apache support and application support, including support of PowerBuilder, .Net and Microsoft Access.
To confuse matters further, some of these optional services are currently being provided by Gen-i under a separate arrangement, says Wood.
Core services are classed broadly as: managerial, remedial (helpdesk, etc), operational and integration.
Watson says a decision should be made by the end of this month.