Spark seals $60 million IRD contract as Revera overhauls tax system
- 12 February, 2016 13:03
Spark has won a contract worth upwards of $60 million to design and supply the new tax and social policy systems for the Inland Revenue, tasking subsidiary Revera to perform the overhaul.
As a provider of cloud-delivered data centre services, IRD’s Deputy Commissioner Greg James says Revera’s data centres contract will play a “significant part” in updating and modernising tax and social policy administration.
“We are delighted that the data centre's contract has been awarded to a New Zealand company,” James says.
“At a value of $45 - 60 million over 10 years, it will be one of the programme's biggest and is certainly the largest contract to date to be awarded to a New Zealand company.”
Spark Digital CEO Tim Miles acknowledged the flexibility and commitment of Inland Revenue to achieve the best possible solutions for taxpayers from its transformation.
“Inland Revenue is working determinedly to modernise the tax system and I have no doubt that this will lead to better outcomes for government and all New Zealanders," he says.
"We are proud to be selected to play a part in such an innovative project and look forward to delivering on the data centre services contract."
Miles says the new Revera data centres will host "essential services" including the new tax system, which has been named START (Simplified Tax and Revenue Technology), with the first of these data centres coming online in the next month.
Miles says START’s data requirements will be variable, and Revera’s design has built in flexibility to cater for these changing needs at any given time.
"Revera’s solution means if we need fewer servers or less storage, we can use just what we need when we need it, and not pay for capacity we’re not using," Miles adds.
At present, Revera has completed the initial detailed design of the new data centre service, with the Inland Revenue’s current FIRST system set to continue to be supported by existing data centres, and during the transition to START, the two data centre systems will co-exist.
Tenderers were sought from the all-of-Government panel of infrastructure as a service providers.
