- Vodafone Australia and Vodafone New Zealand have outsourced IT operations to Hewlett-Packard Australia.
The three-year, multimillion dollar deal includes the IT management of the telco's helpdesks, desktop PC and server operations across Australia and New Zealand.
The move was flagged in November last year when Computerworld Australia obtained a draft document outlining the company's revised business plan for 2001, prepared on November 2 2001. Then-chief operating officer Grahame Maher for Vodafone Australia, said the business is "now extremely inefficient". The document said key to the business developing efficiencies would be a re-engineering of business processes, along with the sell-off and outsourcing of several projects, and partnering of non-core activities.
Included on the agenda was the outsourcing of the IT and engineering division.
The document said an operational saving of about $A8 million ($US4.3 million) would be achieved through the outsourcing of IT.
Maher, now managing director of Vodafone Australia, said: "HP's success in winning this project was very much due to the company's willingness to offer transitional employment to Vodafone staff as part of the agreement."
In conjunction with the outsourcing agreement, a programme to upgrade and standardise Vodafone software to Microsoft Exchange 2000 XP with Bluetooth is scheduled early on in the contract.