Fujitsu Siemens has won a joint contract with Dell to supply the Inland Revenue with 30,000 PCs. Both vendors will use Computacenter as the fulfilment and support partner.

The opportunity to supply the Revenue with PCs was tendered to six qualifying companies.

As incumbent vendors, Compaq and Dell were asked to compete with IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett Packard and NEC for the contract, which is worth an estimated £7.5m.

The win is the result of 18 months of concerted effort by Fujitsu Siemens, according to public sector sales director Steve Kendall-Smith.

"I was headhunted from Dell specifically because of my public sector experience," he said. "We spent a long time touting for this business and had a dedicated director for the purpose of winning the account."

The account director, Martin Whitley, is now a member Fujitsu Siemens' millionaires club, according to Kendall-Smith, and was rewarded with a free holiday in Arizona.

According to Kendall-Smith, vendors are becoming more flexible in the current economic climate.

"I know Dell's mindset having been there four years and they'll work through Computacenter," he explained. "It shows how willing people are to jump through hoops."

Dan Petrovic, product manager for Fujitsu at IT distributor Ideal Hardware, maintained that Fujitsu Siemens is winning public sector business as a result of its channel.

"It's about offering something the channel can make money from which means it'll be [able to satisfy] the really demanding clients," he said.

According to Kendall-Smith, it was Fujitsu Siemens' ownership of component manufacturing processes that swung the deal.

"The Revenue is very exacting," he said. "It wants complete component consistency, from the first PC we supply to the last. In the current market, the component market can change, and supplies aren't consistent.

"The fact that we make a lot of the components ourselves, and the Germanic tradition of reliability, would have impressed the IT buyer that visited our factory."

Having won the PC contract, Fujitsu Siemens is well placed to move up the value chain, Kendall-Smith said.

Its business-critical product range, which includes a PrimePower Unix box running Solaris, and Intel-based Primergy servers, is now being assessed for use in the Tax Office's enterprise computing infrastructure.