Australia's Department of Home Affairs has awarded IBM a new contract for its mainframe system.
Valued at AU$165 million (US$102.5m), the contract spans software licenses, hardware, and hardware maintenance across the Home Affairs enterprise mainframe. The agreement will run until June 30, 2030.
First reported by Innovation Aus, the contract also contains "transition-in activities" ahead of the department's existing contract expiry date of June 2025.
That contract spanned 18 years with IBM for a mainframe agreement, which the department is now looking to transition away from.
The new contract is part of Home Affairs' "Future Compute" strategy which will see IBM products and support separated from managed services.
A spokesperson from Home Affairs told iTNews that the contract marks the "commencement of the future arrangements."
The future of the mainframe environment has been long debated as the department sought to modernize and optimize its IT environment. In 2021, Home Affairs decided to extend the mainframe contract for an additional four years so as to explore the various options. That same year Home Affairs signed a five-year data center hosting deal with Canberra Data Centres as part of the mass exodus from Global Switch facilities across the Australian government.
The latest contract follows on from an AU$725 million (US$451m) contract awarded to IBM in January 2023 via the Whole-of-Government Arrangement with the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) on behalf of the Commonwealth of Australia. That deal included the Department of Home Affairs, and would give access to IBM offerings including IBM Watson, and IBM Cloud.
In January 2024, Home Affairs published a tender looking for managed service providers across a variety of IT functions. That contract, set to begin in late 2024 would include
architecture management, cybersecurity, mainframe services, data center network services, backups, and archiving.
A review in May 2024 found that more than 40 percent of Home Affairs business systems had reached the end of life, and needed IT modernization. The Department's most up-to-date "Technology Strategy" on its website is from 2020.