Seven months after IBM formed a company with Lenovo
Group, after selling its PC business to the Chinese firm for £770m,
the new company has announced details of one of its first UK
customer.
QinetiQ, a defence technology and security company with a large
mobile workforce, has just completed a nine-month roll-out of
Thinkpad notebooks and IBM eServer Bladecenter systems.
The notebooks come under a three-year, £3.4m lease agreement
with IBM Global Finance, with a separate agreement for the
servers.
Lewis Doyle, CIO and purchasing director at QinetiQ, said, "We
chose IBM Lenovo because we were doing a Windows XP roll-out to
10,000 desktops over 14 weeks and wanted a company that could meet
the challenge."
As part of the 10,000-Thinkpad roll-out, QinetiQ ran a 100-user
pilot which found that specific applications would not run under
Windows XP and needed upgrades or adaptations, such as new printer
drivers.
Doyle said QinetiQ was able to reduce the time its engineers
spent at the desktop from five hours to no more than two as they
became more proficient at configuring the notebooks.