OTTAWA — The federal government in recent years has awarded internal contracts to technology company Cisco Systems with high frequency, part of what some observers call a pattern of dependency by Ottawa on a single network provider that has all but shut out competing bids. A division within Shared Services Canada known as Networks, Security, Digital Services (NSDS), has awarded $210 million to Cisco for the use of its networks technology since the beginning of 2019, according to federal data supplied to the National Post.
That amounts to the vast majority of NSDS’s total spending on network technology over the same two-year period, according to industry sources who have tabulated procurements by the department. Ministry and department spokespeople, for their part, declined to provide details on what proportion of NSDS network spending has been sole-sourced to Cisco....MORE
