SITA awards R2.5bn seat management tender

By Kaunda Chama for SITA

Johannesburg, 29 Nov 2004

The State IT Agency (SITA) this morning announced the names of the preferred suppliers for its much delayed and controversial seat management services tender RFT285 and RFT285/1.

The RFT285 is for the outright purchase of ICT equipment and RFT285/1 is for leasing the equipment.

The list features a number of distributors that had initially complained they were unfairly excluded from the tender process. The distributors claimed they could provide products and services at prices that could compete with those from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

The tender has three components: the outright purchase option, the leasing purchase option and the provision of services.

The list of preferred suppliers consists of 31 consortia from the RFT285/1 component of the tender, five consortia for the leasing of a complete seat and nine consortia for the leasing of components.

The list features companies like HP, Mustek, IBM, AST, Pinnacle, Sahara Computers, Dell, Siemens and Rentworks.

The rest of the list comprises a number of potential small and medium enterprise (SME) black economic empowerment (BEE) partners for the OEMs and distributors.

SITA CEO Mavuso Msimang said this morning that the tender would span a three-year period effective immediately, during which the projected R2.5 billion would possibly be exceeded.

"In the meantime, we are going into a period of due diligence, during which certain issues such as involvement of BEE and SMEs will be confirmed," he said.

As there are 31 consortia on the list of preferred suppliers and as some supply similar products and services, SITA says they will be required to bid on specific tenders as and when they come up.

The agency says it will ensure BEE SMEs are involved at all levels of the provision of product services, adding that the gross value of the tenders will be given to the BEE partners.

SITA and the Government Information Technology Officers` Council reopened the outright purchase option of the seat management tender earlier this year, in the interest of open competition and to give equal opportunities to all interested industry players.