Services Australia procures 35,000 monitors & laptops over two months

Canberra based government department, Services Australia, has been reported to purchase around 20,000 laptops and more than 15,000 monitors over the period of last two months. The purchases have been made owing to the shift in working environment from office to home amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a spokesperson, the department has initiated this hardware refresh to meet a broad spectrum of requirements including asset replacement, mobility, growth, and business continuity. He has further stated that of the approximately purchased 19,000 notebooks and 16,000 monitors, as many as 10,000 notebooks and around 13,697 monitors have been bought under various contracts comprising CN3671509, CN3678832, CN3675987, and CN3683440.
For the uninitiated, Services Australia is apparently Canberra’s largest service agency and has reportedly entered into several contracts for the procurement of new hardware devices. The contracts have a valuation of approximately $19.2 million. The largest of these three deals involves the purchase of 6300 Microsoft Pro notebooks for $ 13.5 million from the Canberra-based firm, Forward IT. The agency has also planned to buy additional 1000 Surface Pro notebooks from Ethan Group for a sum of $1.8 million and has also signed a contract for procuring 2200 computer monitors and 1100 Microsoft notebook PCs from Dell Australia at a cost of $3.8 million.
Sources claim that these devices have been bought for surge staff that has been admitted into the department from various other agencies that come under the Australian Public Sector. The procurement initiative has been taken for helping the 27,000-employee government agency for effectively managing large work volumes.
For the record, Services Australia’s hardware upgrade is noted to be one of the largest hardware refreshes in the agency since May 2018, when there was a purchase of 10,000 new desktops and laptops by the former Department of Human Services. However, almost all of the devices procured under the then $27 million hardware refresh had been desktops.
 
Source Credits:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/services-australia-buys-35000-laptops-and-monitors-in-two-months-549163