The South African Revenue Services (SARS) will realise a R470 million saving on IT over the next seven years, through the awarding of its infrastructure services tender, it says.
This morning, Logan Wort, GM of communications at SARS, said the organisation estimated it would have to spend R1.7 billion on IT over the next seven years, an amount it has now managed to trim to R1.3 billion. These costs are related to infrastructure, licensing and the provision of ICT services.
"We will now even be able to use R120 million from that saving for a new network system that forms part of one of the tenders we are awarding," says Wort. He explains that the real savings at the end of the day will, therefore, be R350 million.
"We are negotiating very tight contracts. We believe if you spend some money on technical expertise at the start of the process and know what you are negotiating for, you can save a lot more in the long-term."
Selection process
Yesterday, SARS announced Business Connexion, Dimension Data and Telkom have been selected as preferred bidders for its last three "towers" in the SARS IT services tender.
The "towers" refer to the pillars into which SARS has divided its ICT services provision tenders.
The three companies were selected to run SARS' managed network services, data carrier services, and voice carrier services towers - known as towers one to three.
In May, SARS announced Dimension Data, GijimaAst and Bytes Documents Solutions won the ISP services, workstation services, server services, and workgroup printing services tenders, know as towers four to seven of its ICT tender process.
Wort says SARS took a conscious decision to not award a single, massive contract worth more than a R1 billion, but rather to break it up and allow contactors to sub-contract the work.
"A lot of these smaller companies would not usually be able to benefit from this kind of tender," explains Wort.
While SARS has satisfied its black empowerment requirements through the vendors selected, it will not be able to enforce empowerment conditions on sub-contractors. However, Wort notes the contacts are still being negotiated.
"Many of the small start-up IT businesses are run by black business people and these businesses are still growing."
He points out that SARS will not be responsible for managing a plethora of small companies, as its agreements, including key service level agreements, will be with the companies selected within the seven-tower system.
He says the contract negotiations with all seven preferred tower vendors should be concluded by the end of this year. The contracts will be for a seven-year period and would aim to achieve "a whole IT modernisation" at SARS, says Wort.
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