EDS wins Commander Group 8 deal with Department of Agriculture

EDS has won a $96 million contract with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) to provide managed IT services. The deal is the first to come out of Commander’s lucrative Group 8 agency arrangement with Federal Government.

Last year, the DAFF broke away from the Group 8 IT outsourcing agreement and its long-term relationship with embattled ASX-listed integrator, Commander, in favour of managing its own IT services contracts.

According to an EDS statement, the HP subsidiary will provide desktop, server, storage and architecture services to the department over five years. The deal also encompasses help and service desk support to around 5000 staff over 300 locations, as well as DAFF’s overall storage and IT architecture and design services.

According to head of consulting at Intermedium, Kevin Noonan, the contract was a strategic and necessary win for EDS.

“EDS has in the past been very successful with tier-one agencies. It needed in a strategic sense to round out its customer base, and reaching into a key mid-tier agency is a sound move for EDS,” he said.

Commander, which went into receivership in August last year, took over the Group 8 outsourcing contracts when it acquired Volante Group in 2004. Late last year, the remaining outsourcing contracts were bought by listed Australian IT integrator, CSG.

Noonan said CSG needed to re-establish itself in the Canberra market.

“Winning over this existing government agency base was a risky proposition...this is a long-term challenge for them,” he said.

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