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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-05-29 Daily Xml
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GOVERNMENT MAINFRAME COMPUTER CONTRACT

Ms BETTISON (Ramsay) (14:54): My question is to the Minister for the Public Sector. Can the minister inform the house about what is being done to maintain and protect South Australia's important electronic data?

The Hon. M.F. O'BRIEN (Napier—Minister for Finance, Minister for the Public Sector) (14:55): I thank the member for Ramsay for the question. Members will be interested to know that the government has extended its agreement with Hewlett-Packard Australia for the provision of mainframe computing services. This will provide increased capacity and savings of more than $3 million. The extension will take the term of the mainframe computing services contract to 11 years and five months with an estimated value of $119 million. The mainframe itself is owned, managed and maintained by Hewlett-Packard while the government owns and manages the applications that run on the mainframe.

Members will be aware that mainframe computers are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and government organisations for critical applications, bulk data processing and electronic transactions. The term 'mainframe' originally referred to the large cabinets that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers. Today the term is used to distinguish high-end corporate machines from less powerful desktop computers.

The contract extension ensures access to the capacity required to run critical applications used by most government agencies including the justice information system, police offender information, Housing SA client and asset information management system, and many accounting, HR and payroll systems.

Agencies have already noticed significant improvements in transaction turnaround times since migration to the new mainframe on Tuesday 22 May 2012. This new arrangement will satisfy the government's current and projected processing requirements for the next six years. By allowing immediate access to additional capability and capacity, the risk of outages, and therefore disruptions in service, will decrease. This agreement sees the government gain the operational and performance benefits associated with new infrastructure without having to purchase, own, maintain and manage that infrastructure.

The original eight-year contract between the state government and Hewlett-Packard was due to expire in December 2014. By spreading the costs over a longer period, this new extension (which will expire in May 2018) will achieve approximately $3.1 million in savings over the next six years. This is a positive example of the state government achieving a significant saving while improving a service that is vital to all South Australians.

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