Australian federal government has appointed five data center contractors to lead its IT infrastructure consolidation project. Each of the companies have to provide energy efficient and purpose-built 1,000-2,000 square feet of data center floor space in Canberra and other locations, Australian news service ARN reported Monday.

The consolidation project resulted from last year's review of the government's IT procurement practices by Peter Gershon, whom Minister of Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner commissioned to lead the review in April of 2008. Gershon led a similar review for the British government around 2004.

Five contractors the government selected were Canberra Data Centres, Fujitsu, Global Switch Property, Harbour MSP and Polaris Data Centres.

In his review Gershon concluded that there were government-wide IT-related issues that constituted "weak governance." Governance mechanisms, he wrote, were lacking in focus on efficiency and "understanding of organizational capability to commission, manage and realize benefits from ICT-enabled projects."

Gershon said there was a need for a "whole-of-government" data center strategy to avoid what he predicted would be "a series of ad-hoc investments which will, in total, cost in the order of $1 billion more than a coordinated approach over a 15-year period."