Government seeks suppliers for £6bn of hardware deals

As many as 20 IT vendors could be signed up to provide PCs, servers, storage and other commodity systems

The deals will cover the whole public sector

The government is seeking vendors for £6bn-worth of contracts for supplying commodity hardware and software products to the public sector.

Buying Solutions, the procurement arm of Whitehall purchasing body the Office of Government Commerce, has issued a tender for framework agreements covering personal computing equipment and infrastructure hardware such as servers, storage and routers.

As many as 20 suppliers could be selected as part of the 3.5-year deals, which would provide a standardised set of contracts for public organisations to buy hardware and software at preferential prices thanks to the combined buying power of the sector.

“Buying Solutions is putting in place a pan-government collaborative framework agreement for use by UK public sector bodies including but not limited to central government departments and their agencies, non-departmental public bodies, NHS bodies and local authorities,” says the tender document issued on the Official Journal of the European Union.

The move is the latest of a number of tenders for government-wide framework deals recently issued. Earlier this month, Buying Solutions put up to £1bn of IT and communications contracts for grabs, while in June a tender was put out for £600m-worth of managed IT services provision.