Doesn't IT Services do this stuff?

The ITS Divisions of the eResearch SA members support corporate, desktop and teaching applications. In keeping with normal practice in large organisations, these services are highly standardised in order to deliver consistent service quality across each institution.
While this approach is very cost-effective, it is not always well suited to the needs of researchers seeking to use ICT as a research tool.
eResearch SA, on the other hand, provides researcher-oriented IT tools and services that focus on flexibility and performance and are often highly specialised to specific applications.