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New £4bn UK.gov IT shopping centre slips launch deadline

We name who will (probably) be pumping tech into Blighty's public sector

Exclusive Bosses have been told whether or not their businesses have provisionally made it onto a new list of approved IT suppliers for Blighty's public sector - and resellers feature heavily.

The three-year IT Hardware and Services (ITH&S) framework offers £4bn in work and sales, and will - after delays - eventually replace ESPO Contract 113. It includes ten categories that cover standardised infrastructure kit and two for non-standard specifications.

The involvement of resellers was expected to be lighter than in previous large public-sector frameworks after tech titans HP and Fujitsu warned that the ultra-aggressive pricing required to get a seat at the table will turn away smaller businesses.

However, the lineup seen by The Channel (see below) is dominated by widely-known names. Integrator Fujitsu Services won a place in eight of the lots, services-based reseller Computacenter also fared well by bagging a spot in seven categories, while Insight Direct made it into six.

In fact, the direct involvement of vendors was extremely limited: HP appear in just two lots and Lenovo in one. Others including Dell and IBM did not appear in the provisional lineup at all.

All of the suppliers hoping to get onto the list have been through e-auctions, held by the government, to determine which ones are offering the best prices, say sources.

Under the previous schedule, ITH&S was due to go live from 1 June, but suppliers were only being told of their status on that day, and the agreement is now expected to roll out on 1 July at the very earliest.

The timing will, of course, depend on the number of appeals from disgruntled suppliers that failed to make the provisional list, each of which have 10 days from initial notification - the Alcatel period - to justify their involvement.

ITH&S will run concurrently with the Commoditised IT Hardware and Software and the Sprint ii frameworks, which are due to expire next April.

Government Procurement Services, which is putting together the framework, was still drafting a response to El Reg's questions at the time of writing. ®

Who won what - according to our sources

The following companies have, we're told, made it onto the provisional list of suppliers for the given categories of technology and services to the UK public sector.

  • Lot One: Standard client device hardware & services: Computacenter, Stone Computers, Fujitsu Services.
  • Lot Two: Standard laptop device hardware & services: Lenovo, Fujitsu Services, Computacenter, Viglen.
  • Lot Three: Standard tablet/slate device and services: XMA, Academia, Softcat, Computacenter, and Fujitsu Services.
  • Lot Four: Standard monitor device hardware & services: Viglen, Insight Direct, Fujitsu Services.
  • Lot Five: Standard thin-client device hardware & services: HP, Fujitsu Services, Computacenter.
  • Lot Six: Standard servers hardware & services: XMA, Kelway, Centerprise International Akhtar, Dell, Fujitsu Services, HP.
  • Lot Seven: Standard storage hardware & services: Centreprise International, Fujitsu Services, Kelway.
  • Lot Eight: Standard switch device hardware & services: Misco UK, Viglen, Insight Direct, CC.
  • Lot Nine: Standard printer desktop hardware & services: XMA, Insight Direct, Computacenter, Viglen, Misco, Dell.
  • Lot Ten: Standard peripherals: Insight Direct, Fujitsu Servcies, Misco UK.
  • Lot Eleven: Non-standard hardware and solutions: Insight Direct, XMA, Ergo Computing, Stone Computers, Computacenter.
  • Lot Twelve: Non-standard infrastructure hardware & solutions: Insight Direct, XMA, Stone Computers, Kelway, Computacenter, Ergo Computing, Specialist Computer Centre, Misco UK.

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