Fujitsu Siemens wins Inland Revenue PC deal
Fujitsu Siemens has won a joint contract with Dell to supply the Inland Revenue with 30,000 PCs a year.
Fujitsu Siemens has won a joint contract with Dell to supply the Inland Revenue with 30,000 PCs a year.
It will now split the contract evenly with direct vendor Dell, with both vendors using Computacenter as the fulfillment and support partner.
The opportunity to supply the Revenue with PCs was tendered out to six qualifying suppliers. Compaq and Dell, as incumbent vendors were asked to compete with IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, HP and NEC for the PC supply contract worth an estimated £7.5m.
The contract win is the end result of 18 months concerted effort by Fujitsu Siemens, according to its public sector sales director Steve Kendall-Smith. ‘I was head hunted from Dell specifically because of my public sector experience. We spent a long time touting for this business and had a dedicated account director for the purpose of winning the account.’
The account director, Martin Whitley, is now a member Fujitsu Siemen’s 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 – it shows how willing people are to jump through hoops.’
Fujitsu Siemens is winning public sector business as a result of its channel, was the independent verdict from Dan Petrovic, product manager for Fujitsu at IT distributor Ideal Hardware. ‘It’s about offering something the channel can make money from which means they’ll be offer to meet the demands of the really demanding clients.’
According to Kendall-Smith, it was the German manufacturer’s ownership of component manufacturing processes that swung the deal. ‘The Revenue is very exacting. 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.’