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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39167120,00.htm

Public sector boasts £7m e-auction savings
Or 'vendors lose £7m' depending on your side of the fence...

By Jo Best

Published: Monday 14 May 2007

A number of public sector bodies have clubbed together to shave millions off the cost of their IT hardware.

Six NHS trusts and 14 councils used an e-procurement auction to find the cheapest suppliers for their tech kit, cutting almost £7m off a bill which could have cost £13.7m, according to non-auction benchmarks.

The auctions are the latest round of procurement exercises to be run by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and the London Centre of Excellence, and have saved more than £21m since their inception, according to the government.

The first e-procurement auctions were run in 2005 and have regularly seen savings of millions of pounds on hardware and software.

Today's announcement marks the seventh e-auction in which IT suppliers battle it out by offering the cheapest prices to meet combined government bodies' tech needs, with 325 already using the auction format for procurement.