Johannesburg, 14 Dec 2009
Rivonia-based outsourcing company Think iT is confident of receiving more deals from BAE.
The initial R40 million deal was awarded for a complete technology upgrade for global defence, security and aerospace company BAE Systems' local division in South Africa. The contract will be completed in January, says CTO Louis Botha.
Think iT is also hopeful of a co-sourcing contract, which will see it maintaining the technology it implemented along with BAE's staff. Botha says a final decision will be made in the first quarter of next year.
Another project in the pipeline is the Microsoft Exchange implementation, which is in design phase and is expected to roll out next year.
Botha says the company is also bidding for a three-year service desk deal, which will see a service desk designed from scratch.
"All the building blocks that we are putting in place, we will be maintaining."
Botha explains that BAE has just undergone a complete systems upgrade, driven partially by the need to replace legacy systems so that the local division could integrate with the other global units. He says this included “the replacement and setting-up of BAE Systems' LAN, WAN, data centre, software stack, client computing and disaster recovery infrastructure across its three South African business units”.
The project took just over 18 months to complete - 12 months of physical implementation time and six months for the scoping, planning, equipment sourcing and procurement exercises to take place.