Under the three-year deal, CDT’s data center in Rancho Cordova will take over all the applications that the city now runs on its 30-year-old legacy mainframe, with an option for a second three-year add-on.
“CDT has sufficient staff and technology resources (hardware/software) to accommodate the city of L.A.’s workload,” CDT spokesman Bob Andosca told Techwire on Tuesday in an email.
So how did the IT apparatus of the nation’s largest state come to host the computing and storage needs of one of the nation’s largest cities? Who initiated the talks?
Andosca outlined the process: “In 2016, the CIO of the city of LA, Ted Ross, reached out to CDT’s chief deputy director, Chris Cruz, to discuss the possibility of the state hosting the city’s mainframe applications. The development of the contract language was done in collaboration with the city of L.A. and CDT teams.”
That’s in keeping with a stated goal of Cruz’s — to encourage more cooperation and collaboration between CDT and the state’s counties as a way of maximizing efficiencies and taking advantage of the economies of scale in purchasing, licensing and other functions that governments perform.
But entering into large IT contracts with public-sector customers isn’t a new thing for CDT.
CDT already provides data center services to counties and municipalities, Andosca noted.
“For example, 86 percent of the customer base for our California Network and Telecommunication (CALNET) program contracts are non-state entities, which include cities and counties,” he said.
When the time comes for the city to cut the cord with its old mainframes and switch over to the state’s data center, it won’t be a long, drawn-out process.
“This will likely be cut over on a specific date, rather than a phased migration,” Andosca said. “The date of that cut-over has not been determined at this point.”
