Dell Australia wins $74m desktop deal

More than 100,000 Dell desktops will be rolled out across the Department of Defence as part of its massive next-gen desktop project.

The department announced the $74.4 million contract – which commenced on 21 July and will run for two years – to purchase approximately 100,000 desktop units, running both Windows 7 and Windows 10.

It is expected the contract will see a huge investment in Dell Wyse thin clients. While Defence would not reveal the specific models being sourced, Dell recently launched its Wyse 7040 model. Dubbed the "world’s most powerful thin client", the top-spec model comes with either Core i5 or i7 Intel processors and is being targeted at federal government accounts.

The next-gen desktop project will see the Department of Defence deploy computers so employees can access both the ‘secret’ and ‘restricted’ networks from the same screen.

The project has undergone some significant changes, with the department announcing in June that it would not appoint a single service supplier and would instead spread award work packages to IBM, Accenture, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, Lockheed Martin and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

The department was allocated $500 million over the next ten years in the federal government’s whitepaper for the effort, according to iTnews.

The contract notice for the two-year, $90 million arrangement for Accenture was described as including hardware provision, though a Defence spokesperson confirmed to CRN: "Accenture is not supplying hardware to the Next Generation Desktop Project."

HPE has also won two recent deals by Defence, firstly a two-year contract worth $42.1 million published on 28 June, followed by a further one-year contract for $11.8 million on 2 August. It is thought that both parcels of work support the next-gen desktop project and that both cover services and systems integration, rather than HPE hardware.

Lockheed Martin was awarded a $148 million contract for its work on the end user computing deal and Fujitsu was given $9 million for its work. Both contracts run for two years.