Gauteng Provincial Government in R60m Microsoft licensing deal with SourceCom

The Gauteng Provincial Government has awarded specialist system integrator and reseller SourceCom a R60m contract to license, support and manage its current and future deployment of Microsoft software.

SourceCom was selected as the Microsoft Direct Large Account Reseller of choice out of 14 DLARs in the country, with the three-year contract - including Microsoft Enterprise and Select agreements for GPG's 10 000 staff - one of the largest licensing agreements ever signed in South Africa.

"SourceCom gave us the best value pricing structure for the project," says GPG's chief director of corporate informatics Mohamed Bhyat.

"The SourceCom proposal also showed the track record and skills-depth necessary for a project of this magnitude, and the service and support attitude of the team was spot on." Bhyat says that corporate software licensing has been a government prerequisite for some time, but with the decentralisation of provincial governments from the "single entity" government of the past, a coherent asset management and TCO policy had to be found to manage the process. "Statistics are clear that the purchase price of software accounts for only 10% of its total cost over time, and that without a reliable asset tracking and management policy in place, total cost is grossly exacerbated," he says.

"Add to this the acute staff and skills shortages in the public sector and the increasing computerisation of government structures and we have a real problem on our hands. Losses through theft and attrition, security concerns, increased integration, training, support and service costs, and copyright and licensing infringements can all be traced back to a lack of policy cohesion."

SourceCom senior GPG account executive Gary Fortuin, who was instrumental in winning the licensing tender, says multi-user software licensing agreements have multiple benefits for large companies and government institutions.

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"Aside from the legal issues of licensing software, properly managed licensing agreements ensure the standardisation of software on desktops and servers in an organisation, the standardisation of operating platforms, and encourage a central software licensing management and audit policy. Together these benefits have been shown to reduce the TCO of software in an organisation."

SourceCom is in the process of completing a business plan that further reduces TCO with a range of value-add services, including training, modification, maintenance, technical support, inventory and change control and change management.

"It's important for us that the project builds on the relationship we've established with SourceCom and takes a long-term view of the benefits we expect it to deliver," says Bhyat.

"Only then can we say that costs have been contained and managed to our satisfaction, that the software we own is optimally deployed, that employees are properly trained, that assets are tracked and accounted for, and that return on investment is reliably measured for future growth."