System builder and VAR Viglen has once again thwarted giants such as Dell, HP and IBM to bag a lucrative £8m public sector contract.

The Hertfordshire-based firm came out top of the pile after a tough tender process for the latest Office of Government Commerce (OGC) contract ­- commonly known as OGC11.

This comes hot on the heels of winning the OCG10 contract ­- a £30m tender to supply 100,000 computers to over 48 central and local government councils (CRN 24 August).

Under the 24-month OGC11 contract, Viglen, with support from Vendor Toshiba, will be supplying a further 19 councils with a range of Energy Star-compliant notebooks, desktop PCs, thin clients, servers and TFT monitors. There is also an option to extend the deal for a further 12 months.

Bordan Tkachuk, chief executive of Viglen, said: “It is really refreshing to see that the public sector can buy from a UK organisation and does not just go for the
big players.

“This is a real shot in the arm for Viglen, particularly in such a quiet market and bearing in mind how hard it is to acquire new customers in this environment. We can also use it as a starting point to upsell our services and other offerings,” he added.

He said the firm is recruiting more staff to cope with the increased workload and hinted that there may be more contracts to come.

“It is interesting to see what is happening with the impending election. We are expecting the public sector to use up their budgets and not let anything go to waste. We fully intend to capitalise on that,” he said.

However Des Lekerman, managing director of Eurodata Systems, said the public sector tender process was still unfair for smaller players, despite the success Viglen has achieved.

“It is still an old boys school network and is restrictive for companies like ours. I sincerely hope it will change with a new government, and all companies will be treated as equal.”