Kent County Council has paid IBM £10m to replace 9,000
client devices and then maintain them for five
years.
Under the deal, IBM must ensure all 9,000 devices remain less than
three years old. This guarantees that all the council’s devices
will be replaced once over the contract’s lifetime.
Kent County Council’s e-mail, storage and servers will also be
renewed. Council officers decided to give the maintenance of their
desktop and mobile devices to a third party so that they could
focus on delivering services.
The council’s chief executive, Peter Gilroy, said, “It was
essential that the approach be sufficiently flexible to support
diverse information technology requirements across the full range
of council functions and responsibilities.”
IBM will replace Kent’s existing range of client devices with
ThinkCentre desktop PCs, ThinkPad notebook PCs and Tablet PCs. All
the devices will remain IBM’s property throughout the deal.