Keane seals $367m smartcard tender with Australian transport authority

The deal includes two years of development work and ten years of operation and maintenance.

This state-of-the-art micropayment smartcard technology ticketing system will support Victoria's multi-modal network of 270 railway stations, 480 trams and 1,650 buses that services more than 410 million journeys each year. The new system is scheduled to go live in 2007, enabling travelers to access all types of public transit using a single micropayment smartcard. The smartcard is a durable plastic card similar to a pre-paid mobile phone card, and a significant improvement from today’s paper magnetic-stripe tickets. Passengers will be able to store value on their cards using self-service machines, the telephone or the Internet. With a simple scan of their card at the turnstile or when boarding a bus or tram, the cost of the ride is automatically deducted.

Keane has established the Keane Australia Micropayment Consortium Pty Ltd (Kamco) to lead the Melbourne-based alliance of four of the world's leading transport and technology experts to deliver the new ticketing solution to Victoria's Transport Ticketing Authority (TTA). Kamco, a wholly owned subsidiary of Keane, Inc., will design, build, implement and support the comprehensive smartcard technology system and related equipment. Kamco's partners include Keane entities and automatic fare collection specialists Ascom, ERG, and Giesecke & Devrient Australasia (G&D). Ascom's portion of this deal is valued at approximately A$124M and ERG's portion of this deal is approximately A$106M.

"Keane is committed to being an outstanding business partner with the Transport Ticketing Authority and Victoria Government by creating a collaborative project environment," said Brian Keane, president and CEO of Keane. "Central to the new TTA system is a customer focus to provide reliable, convenient and rapid ticketing processes. We believe that this innovative and repeatable solution will prove relevant to other major international cities looking to address their transit ticketing systems. We also see the applicability of this smartcard and micropayment technology approach to other industries such as financial services and healthcare systems."

The TTA procurement process was rigorous, attracting vendors with ticketing systems experience from around the world. Keane demonstrated deep transit and financial services industry and fare collection experience, strong technology and open systems expertise, and proven leadership in program management to secure the contract through Kamco. Kamco's project team members have successfully implemented other smartcard transit solutions in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore and Holland.

With management control centralized in Kamco's Melbourne-based Program Management Office, the company will oversee the entire engagement and its numerous subcontractors, providing a single point of accountability for the TTA, and will operate the mission-critical back-office financial and data processing system. In addition, Keane will provide application development and integration, business process services and application services through its operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom. By balancing work assignments across a global network of skilled resources, Keane's global delivery model is designed to allow the TTA to tailor work distribution to match cost, resource, project and risk requirements while meeting Keane's high-quality delivery standards regardless of where the work is performed.

The solution design is an innovative departure from the traditional model for transit ticketing systems. The new ticketing system will combine proven, off-the-shelf software (approximately 70 percent) with custom development (approximately 30 percent) in an industry-standard open architecture. The new system will take advantage of the rich functionality of commercial, plug-and-play applications such as the Microsoft AXAPTA Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, and web services technologies such as .NET. Keane has demonstrated that using proven applications and technologies provides a highly reliable, easy-to-maintain system where changes can be made without difficulty. In addition, the use of standard applications eliminates dependency on the software supplier — allowing the Transport Ticketing Authority to choose from an extensive pool of qualified resources to support the system. The system is built with a services-oriented architecture and open standards and it will have the flexibility to expand the solution in the future.