Kent County Council has signed a £10m contract that will
allow it to replace and support its desktops for about £200 per
seat per year.
The average cost of supporting a desktop is £1,368, according to
Gartner analyst Brian Gammage.
Under the five-year agreement, Kent County Council is paying IBM
to both supply and maintain 9,000 desktops and 150 servers. IBM
will deploy Thinkcentre desktop PCs to all 9,000 seats over the
next three years.
In the final two years of the contract, IBM will replace
two-thirds of the desktops so that no one at the council has a PC
that is more than three years old.
Tony Lock, chief analyst at Bloor Research, said, "The bulk of
the cash is spent on the management of the hardware. It is very
easy to ensure you save money on the procurement."
Although Kent County Council has spent just £1,100 per seat over
five years, it remains difficult to tell whether it has got a good
deal, Lock said.
The £10m cost of the contract covers the deployment of 9,000
identical machines. If the council's IT department decides that
some staff need different devices, such as notebook or tablet PCs,
it will have to pay extra.
Lock said, "IT users should put into any agreement with the
supplier ways to change requirements, because forecasting IT needs
is like trying to forecast next week's lottery numbers."
However, the cost of 9,000 PCs, 6,000 replacement PCs and 150
servers, including maintenance, may have been greater if the
council had bought them directly. "The customer might be hard
pushed to get that amount of hardware at that price," said
Lock.
IBM will be paid under a service credit system - it receives
less money if it fails to meet the service level agreement. "The
service level is 99.9% availability," said Peter Bole, ISG
programme manager at the council.
The council said it decided to hand its desktop and server
management to a supplier so that it could concentrate on using IT
for frontline services and delivering e-government.