Tax Office and Optus in final negotiations for managed network services contract

Media release 2009/36

The Tax Office today announced the commencement of final contract negotiations with Optus Networks Pty Limited as service provider for the first of the three ICT outsourced service bundles- managed network services (MNS).

The MNS bundle includes the provision of data and voice carriage services, telephony services, wide area network and local area network services, video conferencing services, and call centre infrastructure and services.

The Tax Office currently spends approximately $60.5 million a year on these services.

Second Commissioner David Butler said the Tax Office's objective is to achieve a value for money, business focused outcome from the arrangements for its managed network services.

"We expect to complete our contract negotiations in the coming weeks and will provide more information on the contract after that point," Mr Butler said.

While Optus has been selected to proceed to the final stage of contract negotiations, should the Tax Office fail to reach a satisfactory outcome in this phase of the process, it has the right to re-introduce any or all of the current MNS respondents back into the procurement process.

Background

Industry was briefed on the MNS bundle in December 2007. The Tax Office released an expression of interest in January 2008 and received seven responses.

In March 2008, the Tax Office announced that, following the expression of interest process, four companies had been selected to proceed to the request for tender stage of the MNS process. They were Dimension Data, Computer Sciences Corporation, Optus and Telstra.

The short-listed organisations worked with the Tax Office in focused workshops to collaborate on potential solutions for the specified MNS services.

The request for tender issued to the four short-listed organisations in late September 2008, the response period closed on 7 October 2008 and responses were then evaluated.

In December 2008, two short-listed companies were selected to enter into contract negotiations with the Tax Office. They were Dimension Data and Optus.

Status of other bundles

End user computing - the request for tender closed on 11 May 2009. A contract is expected to be in place by March 2010.

Centralised computing - the Tax Office expects to release the request for tender in July 2009 with a contract expected to be in place by mid-2010.