Vic Education reveals $80m deals in delayed hardware panel

Acer and Samsung are the first cabs off the rank on the much-delayed panel to supply computers to Victorian schools.

Acer has secured a contract worth up to $70 million over two years, while Samsung is in line for up to $10 million of orders over the next two years as part of the Department of Education and Training's 'Curriculum Computer Hardware Panel'.

It's thought to be the first time Samsung has secured a place as a prime contractor on a Victorian education panel. It's understood the vendor will be supplying its range Android tablets. 

While the potential spend is huge – given that education represents the largest wedge of state government computer spend – the figures may not tell the whole story, because CRN understands it is not mandatory that schools purchase through the panel.

The new arrangement includes desktops, notebooks and convertibles, Windows and Android tablets and Chromebooks. It replaces a former panel occupied by Acer, Dell, Lenovo, HP and Toshiba.

A spokesperson for the department told CRN: "Hardware manufacturers may nominate authorised resellers as a sales channel."

This should be good news for the likes of Melbourne's Learning with Technology, which is one of Acer's biggest resellers in Australia and also partners with Samsung and Lenovo.

Acer's sales director, Acer Oceanic, Rod Bassi, said: "The sheer size of this contract makes this an unquestionably significant win for Acer – and one that reinforces our pre-eminent position as the number one supplier of computers to the Australian K-12 education market.

“This new two-year, $70 million contract represents an extension of an already successful partnership between Acer and Victoria’s Department of Education and Training.

“We already have a proven track record as a supplier of large-scale rollouts to the department, such as our recent deployment of 14,000 Acer P446 TravelMate notebooks to school communities on budget and within an extremely tight timeframe," said Bassi.

The education department would not provide CRN with information on the budget of the previous panel. Nor would it explain why the new arrangement was running months behind schedule, which is "commercial in confidence".

Vital information remains unclear, such as the rest of the suppliers to be announced, how many preferred tenderers the department was speaking to, or even whether negotiations were taking place. The agency did not respond to CRN's queries about other suppliers.

The Victorian government announced its $65 million end-user compute panel last November, when Lenovo was beaten to a prime contractor position by its own reseller, Southern Cross Computer Systems.