SourceCom wins first independent Provincial Administration IT contract

IT services company SourceCom has won a three-year, R64m contract with the Western Cape Provincial Administration's Chief Directorate Information Technology (CDIT).

CDIT is responsible for the total IT function of the Western Cape, maintaining and supporting the administration's desktop, network and OS infrastructure and developing its custom applications.

The contract includes the supply of all PC equipment, file servers, network equipment (hubs, switches and routers), notebooks, printers and related peripherals from December 1999 to December 2002. It is the first contract of its kind in the Western Cape and the first in the country to break away from the national RT222SA tender published last year.

"The main reason for establishing a provincial tender was to reinvest the skills development and financial benefits of the contract in local companies and bolster the SMME economy in our own province," says CDIT's IT infrastructure manager Jerome Jacobs. "The national tender was a 12-month contract but we felt a long-term partnership of at least three years was needed to maximise the benefit for both parties.

"The administration has 70 000 staff and an installed base of more than 16 000 PCs. It was important for us to identify local partners capable of supplying equipment and installation skills to the quality standards outlined in the tender."

Tender WKT30003/99A, contested by some of the largest IT companies in the country, listed 14 equipment evaluation criteria, 11 of which were won by SourceCom over a five-month period. Points were awarded for, among other things, competency in Cisco routers and switches, 3Com network equipment, Compaq file servers, IBM notebooks, Mecer desktops and notebooks, Brother printers and HP scanners.

"Most of the companies that contested the tender are Johannesburg-based, which went against our local development objectives and had other implications for delivery time and support costs," says Jacobs. "In topping the majority of equipment criteria, however, SourceCom won the tender not only as a Cape-based empowerment company but also on merit and has since demonstrated the consistent quality of service we were looking for.

"SourceCom's extended distribution network also gave us the reach we needed to supply remote regions."

SourceCom senior account manager Abdul Gierdien says the contract has so far benefited SourceCom's internal staff and that of channel partners and suppliers. He adds: "Winning the contract has furthered our strategy to skill-up internal staff - most of whom come from previously disadvantaged communities - to be able to compete for future tenders of this calibre by virtue of their skills and experience. More than a dozen jobs were created as part of the tender, three of which were internal and the rest at partner sites."

The format of the tender has already been adopted by other administrations and government departments, including Parliament, as a template for future private sector tenders.