Council buys £11m Computacenter-managed desktops

South Lanarkshire Council has signed a seven-year, £11m desktop systems and services contract with Computacenter.

The deal includes managed services covering 5,000 desktops, laptops and printers, including functions such as patch management.

Kay Brown, IT director at South Lanarkshire, told silicon.com: "We looked at our desktop [environment] and wanted it to be more like a utility."

The contract runs for seven years with the option of a three-year extension - long by most organisations' standards and even this council's. Its previous contract length was for three years with an option of two more.

UK provider RM has a contract for education technology with South Lanarkshire, which serves around 307,000 citizens in central and southern Scotland, but the previous desktop agreement was with HP.

"We looked at the ability for any supplier to manage and realised Computacenter is a services company," added Brown. Although HP now has a strong desktop services business, she said that South Lanarkshire's relationship with that vendor, which dates from the days of DEC, wasn't in the same vein. DEC was bought by Compaq which was subsequently bought by HP.

Transformation is rated as of 'great' or 'moderate' interest by 95 per cent of public sector organisations, according to recent research from the winning supplier in this case, Computacenter, and Brown said South Lanarkshire was already in line or ahead of targets for e-government services by 2005.