The Australian Treasury will soon launch a tender for midrange and data center services, as well as separate hyper-converged infrastructure services, as part of a continuation of its strategic IT sourcing programme.
The program was described by CIO Ramez Katf in 2021 as “all about modernization [the ATO’s] IT outsourcing portfolio through the development of market-oriented and more flexible bundles”.
The program’s original timeline called for “a progressive market approach in 2022 and then contract execution, transition and service transformation in 2023.”
She has largely not deviated from this; itnews reported earlier this year that tenders for midrange and hyper-converged infrastructure would be published as part of a “third wave” expected in July or August.
The ATO has now issued advance notices for these tenders, stating that the actual tenders will be published mid to late this month.
Like previous approaches, it will offer either midrange and data center services.”as a whole“, or with some components that are assigned separately.
Midrange platform services cover “physical and virtualized platforms for spplication workload hosting … up to and including the hypervisor and including all aspects of lifecycle management,” according to the ATO.
Also covered is data storage for ATO’s end-user, midrange and mainframe platforms, it said.
Hyper-converged infrastructure will be treated separatelysaid the ATO, noting that it acts as a “discrete and self-contained ‘as-a-service’ platform that provides ATO with on-demand access to compute, storage and connectivity for both midrange platforms and end-user services offers”.
The ATO noted that while it has a cloud-first policy, which also reduces its reliance on midrange physical and virtual services, not every workload is suitable for cloud hosting.
“In the long term, there is still a need for on-premises solutions,” the office said.
“ATO is looking for platforms that offer the best technical capabilities aligned to how our application teams need to work with flexible commercial arrangements that offer the best value for money.”
The tax office was also open to non-hyperconvergent “alternatives in the process”.
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