Lockheed Martin [LMT] said on Wednesday it has received a contract worth about $800 million from the Australian Department of Defence for a major data center consolidation effort.
The company said that the award to its Australia-based company, Lockheed Martin Australia, further solidifies its position as a top information technology (IT) service provider to international customers while supporting its strategy of international expansion.
“In Australia we’re developing an increasingly strong footprint in our information systems business,” Sondra Barbour, Lockheed Martin’s executive vice president of the Information Systems and Global Solutions segment, said in a statement.
Under the eight-year contract with the Australian DoD Chief Information Office Group, Lockheed Martin Australia will consolidate 280 centers into 14, 11 of which will be domestic and three international-based. The work is expected to be completed in 2022.
The consolidation will improve effectiveness and efficiencies.
“The project will deliver a smaller number of more reliable and resilient data centers,” Peter Lawrence, chief information officer for the Australian DoD, said in a statement. “It will improve the availability, reliability and security of [the DoD’s] computer processing capability.”
The DoD network is the third largest in Australia and consists of more than 6,000 servers, three primary data centers and more than 100,000 work stations.
Lockheed Martin will be responsible for leading the consolidation of infrastructure and applications. The company will also manage a team of subcontractors that includes Japan’s
NEC Global’s NEC Australia business, ASG Software Solutions, Dell Inc., Deloitte, Australia’s Canberra Data Centres, Cisco [CSCO], ISI, NetApp [NTAP], VMware [VMW], and EMC Corp. [EMC].
In Australia, Lockheed Martin’s IT work has also includes building and maintaining secure network and communications infrastructure for the Tax Office.