University of Newcastle hands DXC three-year contract to manage student system | ZDNet

DXC has scored a multi-year deal with the University of Newcastle (UoN) to manage its Oracle-based core student information system and infrastructure.

Under the partnership, DXC will provide 24/7 critical coverage as well as Amazon Web Service technology management, database, middleware support under the three-year contract, with the option to extend it for another year.

“The University of Newcastle is committed to ensuring a high continuity of service in a cost-effective manner,” University of Newcastle solutions associate director Ben Patey said.

“Our partnership with DXC ensures that our applications are always up to date with the latest patching releases and all the university enhancements required are deployed, maximising our investment in the software.”

The move comes off the back of the university deciding a few years ago to exit completely from its on-premise data centre and migrate all workloads to AWS Cloud.

According to UoN CIO Anthony Molinia, the university’s cloud-first strategy was manifested from its digital strategic plan that was released in mid-July 2017.

“The cloud-first strategy is a principle that we adopted as a desire to transform and as a way to change the organisation not just from tooling perspective and what the cloud offers from a server, compute, and storage capacity, but also from an operating model perspective, as well as a new way of working to deliver value to the organisation,” he told ZDNet at the time.

Meanwhile, Australia Post has reported that the upgrade to the telecommunications network at over 4,000 sites, including all post offices, mail and parcel facilities, and corporate offices across the country has now been completed.

The upgrade, which kicked off two years ago, involved rolling out an enterprise-wide collaboration and conferencing platform, standardising the organisation’s six contact centres onto one platform, bringing 20,000 mobile devices used by support team members onto single platform.

Australia Post awarded managed service provider Comscentre with a five-year contract to help with the upgrade.

“Customers expect more information in real time and transparency through the supply chain and we are making sure we have the telecommunication infrastructure to deliver for them,” Australia Post CIO Munro Farmer said.

“By transitioning all of our post offices and facilities to a new, highly resilient and scalable data network, equipping them with Wi-Fi capability, and improving internet bandwidth, we are now able to deliver a significantly higher service level at every one of our sites.” 

Farmer added that the incumbent postal service can now identify and mitigate 80% of issues, and, as a result, reduce business impact outages by over 70%, as well as on boarding new capabilities such as mobile point of sale, IoT, and AI and machine learning solutions can be accelerated.

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