The contract includes options for a two-year extension and covers support for LAN and WAN services, IT procurement and asset management, application development, disaster recovery provisioning and helpdesk services.

Norfolk Group manages and operates 15 electrical, mechanical and building product businesses across Australia and New Zealand.

The group's IT manager, David Gregson, said the project goes live in October and by outsourcing most IT services to Datacom the company can optimise its IT infrastructure.

"Our new outsourcing model is about improving business flexibility and services to our internal businesses and their customers," Gregson said.

"We picked Datacom because it demonstrated the ability to transition us to a transformed environment in an aggressive time frame." Norfolk Group previously used in-house IT support; however, a review of the group's IT strategy found it was more cost effective to outsource the entire operation.

The new contract involves transitioning the Norfolk Group to a centralised IT platform based on Citrix MetaFrame to offer common file and data access across all Norfolk Group locations.

Datacom will also host and manage Norfolk Group's IT infrastructure from its Sydney data centre in order to reduce support costs and improve security.

Michael Browne, CEO of Datacom, said this is a strategically significant win for Datacom beating the biggest players in the IT outsourcing market.