Washington Technology Solutions (WaTech) has identified more than $4.5 million in savings through its Mainframe as a Service (MFaaS) transition project.
"I'm pleased to announce that this project will deliver sustainable, cost-effective mainframe services and cut costs by more than 30% for most agency customers," said state CIO and WaTech Director Jim Weaver. "This will represent more than $4.5 million in annual savings for the state, and for the agencies consuming this service, who will be able to capture those savings in their budgets for the upcoming biennium."
WaTech partnered with Chicago-based Ensono to transition the current on-premise mainframe environment to Ensono's cloud-based services. The contract was signed on March 2 by Weaver.
Over the past year WaTech has worked to optimize direct and support costs for its mainframe services, already identifying $2 million in savings. As a result, supplemental funding support from the Office of Financial Management via the central service model will no longer be needed.
WaTech will pass on an additional $2.5 million in annual savings to the state from the MFaaS contract with Ensono. These savings will be passed through to agencies as price reductions beginning next July.
Ensono has taken over operations of the current mainframe in Olympia and will migrate the state enterprise workloads (applications, databases and interfaces) to Ensono's Data Center in Omaha, Nebraska in December.
Ensono's mainframe as a service (MFaaS) offering will enable WaTech to serve its state agencies and citizens with greater speed and efficiency. The new model will scale cost-effectively with agency utilization on the platform-agencies only pay for what they use.