Inland Revenue has selected New Zealand company Revera as the preferred supplier for the design and supply of data centre services to support the country’s new tax and social policy system.
Revera, a wholly owned subsidiary of Spark Digital, is a leading provider of cloud-delivered data centre services.
Inland Revenue Deputy Commissioner Change, Greg James, said the data centres contract is one of the most significant elements of the agency’s programme to modernise New Zealand’s tax and social policy administration.
“We are delighted that the data centres contract has been awarded to a New Zealand company. 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,” Mr James said.
“It is another very important step towards a simpler, more cost-effective tax system to make paying taxes and receiving entitlements simpler, and reducing compliance costs for New Zealand businesses.”
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,” Mr Miles said.
“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.”
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.
Mr James said 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.”
Revera has completed the initial detailed design of the new data centre service.
Inland Revenue’s current FIRST system will 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.