Urban fire and rescue services deploys IBM Cloud to minimise impact of hazards and emergency incidents on the people, environment and economy of New South Wales

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – 18 Nov 2014 — /BackupReview.info/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has signed a five year agreement with Fire & Rescue New South Wales (FRNSW), one of the world’s largest urban fire and rescue services, to deploy a new ’as a service’ based IT delivery platform that will underpin the delivery of mission critical services to citizens within the New South Wales (NSW) Community.

FRNSW is one of the key agencies involved in the response phase of most emergency or disaster events throughout NSW. It provides rapid, reliable help in emergencies, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Given the mission critical nature of its work, FRNSW requires its systems and applications to be inherently reliable, easily scalable and flexible enough to quickly deploy new business services as needed.

To support its emergency response, FRNSW uses one of the largest and most advanced deployments of SAP’s Emergency Services system in the world. The system hosts mission critical workloads for 100,000 staff and volunteers across five agencies in NSW.

Under the terms of the new agreement, IBM will design, build and run the new ‘as a service’ platform as well as manage the migration of FRNSW workloads, including the Emergency Services SAP system to the NSW Government Data Centres.

The solution is designed to improve flexibility to cater for growth, deliver better IT resource utilisation, consolidate IT workloads and reduce the risk and cost of manual intervention through automation. As a result of the migration, FRNSW will be one of the first NSW Government agencies to transform its business to an ‘as a service’ model.

“The move towards the IBM NSW Government Cloud provides us with a powerful, scalable and on-demand platform hosted in a world-class facility that is many times more powerful than we could afford to procure with traditional on-premise IT deployments, “ said Richard Host, CIO, Fire and Rescue New South Wales. “This new approach will enable FRNSW to identify and respond to hazards and emergencies in a faster and more informed way, minimising impact and enhancing the safety, quality of life, and confidence of our community.”

Under the agreement, FRNSW will deploy key workloads like SAP ERP, Oracle RAC and also its Geospatial Information on the IBM Cloud infrastructure based in the NSW Government Data Centre, with a flexible consumption based pricing model. The IBM solution will deliver key business benefits such as accelerated workload deployments with reusable patterns, management of all workloads through a single dashboard and also better data management and efficiencies through Tivoli Storage Manager.

The move addresses the NSW Government Data Centre Reform initiative and ICT Strategy, which provides NSW Government agencies with the ability to improve service delivery within their own business, and supports the principle of sharing infrastructure and systems across agencies.

“The Data Centre Reform provided the perfect opportunity for FRNSW to build a new, more innovative IT delivery capability that will enable us to be more responsive to the safety needs of our community,” Host continued. “As a progressive IT organisation, we constantly seek the best way to build the most robust systems and to make our community the safest it can be. Having a progressive approach to technology is critical in achieving those goals.”

“IBM has been a key partner across NSW Government for more than 20 years, providing solutions that underpin the delivery of mission critical services to citizens within the NSW Community,” said Mark Brewer, General Manager, IBM Global Technology Services ANZ. “We are delighted to be partnering with FRNSW to further enhance its capabilities to deliver important services to the NSW Community.”

About Fire & Rescue
New South WalesFire and Rescue NSW (as of 1 January 2011) formerly the New South Wales Fire Brigades (NSWFB), created in 1910, is the State Government agency responsible for the provision of fire, rescue and hazmat services in cities and towns across New South Wales in accordance with the Fire Brigades Act 1989 , the State Emergency and Rescue Management Act 1989 and other related legislation. The FRNSW is one of the key agencies involved in the response phase of most emergency or disaster events throughout NSW.

FRNSW is one of the world’s largest urban fire and rescue services and is the busiest in Australia. Our overriding purpose is to enhance community safety, quality of life, and confidence by minimising the impact of hazards and emergency incidents on the people, property, environment and economy of NSW.

About IBM Cloud
IBM is the global leader in cloud with an unmatched portfolio of open cloud solutions to enable clients for the hybrid cloud era with integration, control over data and expertise. IBM Cloud has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a growing global network of data centres. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM’s public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

Contact(s) information
Le Tran
IBM External Relations
+61-406-314-516
letran@au1.ibm.com

Source: IBM

 

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