The Australian Government’s centralised sourcing mechanism with Microsoft has offered the country’s Information Management Office with $100m in savings.
According to the Australian government chief technology officer John Sheridan, the move was possible by consolidating contracts from 42 to one and working through a single reseller.
The savings has been attributed to the transformation of the whole-of-government purchasing system for software used on the Government’s 300,000 desktops and 260,000 people across 126 units.
Sheridan said that the country has saved in the 18 months to December 2012, some $27m in desktop hardware prices
"Before we started this work, the average the Australian government paid for desktop hardware was 54 percent above the Australian average; it’s now 49 percent below the Australian average," Sheridan said.
"We don’t want to force agencies into common infrastructure design."
Microsoft is among several US technology firms being probed over allegations of over-pricing and was summoned to by the parliament IT pricing inquiry together with Apple and Adobe.
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