Schoolies week for Acer: $30 million in education deals

Acer resellers IRIS, TOPS, Alpha West and Corporate Express will deliver and manage the rollout of around 9000 Acer Veriton 5500G desktops to DET in Tasmania over the next three years.

The Tasmanian government recently earmarked an additional $7.5 million to spend on hardware and IT infrastructure.

Acer has an existing contract with this department to rollout its server systems and over the past 12 months has delivered around 500 servers and expects to ship a further 300 over the next year.

Canberra-based Acer reseller Dataflex has been selected to rollout around 1500 Acer desktops to the ACT Department of Education over the next 12 months. It will share this contract with system builder TodayTech which will rollout an additional 1500 desktop to the department. This contract is for two years with a potential one year extension, said Michael Cefai, national government and education manager at Acer.

Cefai said Acer is now supplying to every state government department around the country apart from South Australia and the Northern Territory. For both deals, the departments requested that Acer employ channel partners to deliver the machines, he said.

He said while the NSW, QLD and Tasmania state governments use sub-contractors to deliver equipment, the Victorian government prefers to deal direct for bulk PC purchases. “There hasn't been room for a channel partner in the past [in Victoria]. But flow on business in Victoria has been through the channel,” he said.

In February this year, the Acer channel was not included when Acer won a deal to supply around 20,000 PCs to the Victorian Department of Education, Employment and Training (DEET VIC).

Cefai claimed that “it was the direction” of some state government departments to employ channel partners for these contracts. He agreed that there may now be pressure on the government to promote local industry players.