The move will determine how NSW moves towards a whole-of-government cloud computing framework and where its $2 billion-plus IT budget should be spent.
Finance and Services Minister Greg Pearce will today announce that Hewlett-Packard, Unisys and Fronde have been selected as key suppliers for the three-month trial at shared services agency ServiceFirst.
HP has been selected to develop a proof of concept for desktop as a service while Unisys and Fronde will build a Microsoft- and Google-based messaging as a service platform, respectively.
The decision follows expressions of interest in February.
"Cloud services facilitate simple, convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of computing services and falls under the objectives of the NSW government ICT strategy," Mr Pearce said.
"Cloud is part of the future of ICT service delivery and these pilots will play a key role in helping government make the right decisions about adopting cloud-based solutions," he said.
The vendors will be paid an undisclosed amount.
The criteria for assessing the pilots included integration with the ServiceFirst environment, ease of working with vendors, and maturity of the offerings, a spokesman for Mr Pearce told The Australian.
The scope of the pilot did not include further rollouts, but scalability was one of the criteria for assessing the success of the trial, the spokesman said.
ServiceFirst uses a Novell network environment with Microsoft as its main enterprise applications provider.
Ovum research director Steve Hodgkinson said, unlike NSW, the federal government had taken a much more conservative approach to cloud computing.
Canberra was more pre-occupied at a whole-of-government level with the "theoretical risks of cloud services and the creation of new rules which constrain cloud services adoption", Mr Hodgkinson said.
"This is understandable to some degree due to the scale of the agencies and political sensitivity of the issues, but the key issue has been that cloud services have been viewed as part of a procurement efficiency agenda rather than as a catalyst of innovation.
"This is changing with the release of the National Cloud Computing Strategy and AGIMO's updated cloud policies, but the approach in NSW remains more pragmatic and business outcomes focused," he said.
Mr Hodgkinson said NSW was ahead of the game because it had a clear strategy and had mobilised an "action-oriented program" of cloud services pilots and projects in different agencies in order to gain early hands-on experience of cloud services adoption.
"The dynamic nature of this market, and the fact that cloud services require new thinking and approaches to ICT procurement and management by agency executives, means that hands-on experience in agencies is the most important driver of success from a whole-of-government perspective.
"Cloud services adoption is best driven at an agency-by-agency level with a focus on innovation and organisational learning … with an eye to business outcomes and the propagation of lessons learned across agencies as experience is gained," he said.
According to Mr Hodgkinson, the NSW government's ICT strategy was showing "more resolute determination to live in the future rather than the past".
He cited the adoption of Google Apps and SAP Business By Design software-as-a-service solutions by the NSW Department of Trade & Investment as good examples.
"These projects explicitly confront the causes of the failure of traditional approaches to ICT procurement and shared services in government and seek to achieve a 'step change' upwards in the department's ability to use ICT capabilities as a catalyst for improved innovation and productivity across a portfolio of 15 agencies."
He said the SAP project was "one of the most visionary and exciting cloud services projects in any government worldwide" as it was "genuinely game-changing in terms of creating a new logic for ICT-enabled business transformation in the public sector".
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Fran Foo
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 16.07.2013
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