Gosford City Council signs landmark multi-council agreement with VMware

More than 40 councils now covered as part of two-year contract renewal

SYDNEY, 25 September 2013 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualisation and cloud infrastructure, today announced that 43 councils, led by Gosford City Council, have jointly renewed and extended their contracts with VMware to drive up to $3m in savings and value to NSW.

The deal saw Gosford City Council expand its contract to include VMware View for virtual desktops, mobility; and vCentre Operations for cloud and datacentre management. Gosford City Council took the lead on the landmark multi-council deal to help assist Councils in NSW to reduce costs and improve services across the state.

“Like most organisations, councils experience a tremendous enthusiasm for technology from our customers. We also feel the challenge of budgets – councils provide services to the community and every major investment in technology must be offset against some other service. As such, there is significant pressure for innovative solutions to increase what we provide while reducing the cost of providing it,” said Council’s Manager Information Management & Technology, Mr. Gregory Punshon.

“Our focus is on giving the workforce what it needs to be efficient and effective, and giving the community access to the information and services they need as accessibly as we can – this absolutely requires technological innovation."

Gosford City Council drew on its experienced technical and legal teams to broker the multi-council arrangement, which it sees as integral to state-wide goals around government sustainability and service innovation.

After canvassing widespread support from other councils for continuing with VMware, Gosford City Council signed directly with the company to not only generate further efficiency dividends but also sustain focus on innovation with VMware’s compelling suite in mobility, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud.

"To ensure NSW local governing bodies received competitive pricing for virtualisation products, one Council needed to step up” added Mr Punshon.

“With our expertise and strong relationship with VMware, it made sense for us to take this opportunity to give back to our fellow councils and their constituents, while increasing the robustness of our solutions and offering greater flexibility to our internal customers.”

“One of the emerging challenges that Gosford and other councils are facing is provisioning end user environments across the organisation" said Council’s IT Coordinator, Jamie Beal.

“Having successfully relied on VMware to deliver substantial efficiency dividends across our server and network infrastructure thus far, we’re confident that a solution like View will assist in providing a uniform platform with centralised management that meets our needs.

“By renewing this agreement across 43 councils, we’ve hoped to broaden access to these modular solution bundles and VMware’s supporting technical expertise in what should yield significant flow-on service improvements.

“Technological innovation is critical to providing cost effective services to the community. Virtualisation has already proven a valuable platform for Gosford Council and has potential to assist with developments across other local governing bodies,” added Mr. Beal

“Without VMware virtualisation, it would have been far more challenging to deliver the services we provide today" said Gosford City Council’s IT Systems Administrator, Byron Twilley, citing Gosford’s large size and cost-effectiveness standards as some of the most demanding of any NSW councils.

“Gosford City Council itself will adopt several new virtualisation and management tools across its IT infrastructure as part of the deal, including progressively deploying VMware’s View platform to implement desktop virtualisation across more than 600 desktops and laptops currently used by staff. This will provide council staff with improved mobility services and service delivery levels through centralised management,” Mr. Twilley added.

“We’re proud to be supporting this unprecedented collaboration between local councils across NSW and their joint bid to better serve their constituencies through best-practice use of ICT,” said Duncan Bennet, managing director, VMware ANZ.

“Since first working with them in 2008, we’ve had the pleasure of watching Gosford City Council establish itself as a true leader in public-sector IT innovation at the grassroots level, and we look forward to further assisting them as they set their sights on building a more mobile and resilient workforce.”