Kent council plans £10m rolling desktop upgrade

Kent County Council is spending £10m over the next five years on a rolling refresh of its desktops, and replacing its server and storage infrastructure.

It is also upgrading software, moving to Windows Server 2003, Exchange 2003 and Windows XP.

The council, which serves 1.3 million residents, is one of the largest in the country. Peter Bowle, information services group programme manager at the council, told silicon.com: "Our starting point was the age of our existing infrastructure - it is NT 4 based and due for replacement."

Bowle said the council was keen to get out of the cycle of buying hardware only to see it go out of date within a couple of years.

"We were finding that our approach, while cost-effective because we could sweat the assets, was an obstacle to our business development," he said.

He said the aim of the council's deal with IBM is to get off that "merry-go-round" and find a sustainable way of upgrading its desktops.

"We will no longer own the equipment. It's effectively a service-based rental contract and we'll get the benefit of a rolling refresh programme," he said.

Under the terms of the deal, IBM Global Services will replace the existing email, storage and server infrastructure at the council.

This will be followed by a rolling replacement of 9,000 desktops at the rate of 12 per day for five years - with 15,000 new devices being delivered in total.

The hardware specification will be regularly updated so devices rolled out six months into the project will be of a higher spec than the earlier ones.

As a result staff will always be using devices that are less than three years old.

Council staff will manage the software, systems and services delivered through the infrastructure.

Kent County Council chief executive Peter Gilroy said in a statement: "The council set itself the objective of establishing infrastructure provision that would realise the vision of technology as an enabler. This required a solution that allowed for constant refresh of infrastructure, while remaining cost effective."