By Andy McCue, 22 August 2008 12:37
NEWS
The government's buying body has slashed the cost of procuring laptops and desktop PCs using online reverse auctions.
The e-auction, facilitated by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and sponsored by OGCbuying.solutions, was for 5,000 laptops and 5,000 PCs and achieved savings of 50 per cent on the laptops and 20 per cent on the PCs.
The reverse auctions work by forcing suppliers to bid decreasing prices for the contract offered, in response to competitor's bids. Only the buyer can see who is offering each price.
Terry Love, senior category manager responsible for client devices at OGCbuying.solutions, said in a statement: "To say I'm pleased with the results is an understatement. We were hoping for prices of up to 40 per cent lower than the current benchmark. Achieving around 50 per cent savings for the laptops is a phenomenal result. This will really pave the way in helping our customers meet their savings targets."
Chris Chettle, ICT commercial delivery manager of OGC, added in a statement: "We have always been convinced of the potential for savings through collaboration and e-auctions, and are really pleased with these latest results. The nine e-auctions we have undertaken so far have realised total savings of 35 per cent - which equates to £33.3m saved overall."
The laptops and PCs are available to all public sector customers and there will also be a range of upgrades available, which will be offered at discount prices.
The winner of the laptop and PC auction was IT supplier Insight.
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Perhaps the real story is that the Government Procurement department are really pretty poor at their jobs, and the reverse action forced out the truth - 50% saving on laptop and 20% on desktop is a shocking saving. Maybe the NAO should investigate to see if previously rthey had been offering any sort of value for money to the taxpayer.
Reverse auctions are a procurement driven way of doing business, and are more suited to buying boxes of chips than strategic IT purchases.
Maybe they should outsource the entire job to Tesco's or Amazon........ or just do a government wide mega-deal with Dell.
2. misceng
The real story is that they need a bulk supply of laptops to replace all the ones they are losing with our personal data on them.
3. Rdaical Meldrew
Maybe they should've looked on EBay and bought some of their lost laptops back!