Charity IT

wij

wij

wij

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Been asked to spec up a refit for a local Church.

Just wondering what sort of places were likely to give discounts as they are a registered charity and do a lot of work in the local community.

I know about CTXchange and have applied for them to become members of that for software licensing and also hopefully some decent Cisco gear.

At the moment their preferred supplier of servers + desktops / laptops is Dell and the list price on a quote I knocked up last night online came in at around £22k - anybody able to shed some light for me on what I might be able to beat Dell down to on that, would be for an R170, some sort of DAS box and about 30 desktops and maybe 5 entry level laptops.

I'm going to go to HP to get a competitors quote (have to do this anyway as part of the process) to give me something else to barter against Dell with but I have a feeling they won't be quite as cheap. :)
 
You quoted it on-line?

How about phoning the business end and asking to speak to a sales manager.

They will be able to give you a better price.
 
^^^ this. we we're pleasantly surprised how much our d630 laptops and poweredge 2900 was on the quotes from the sales guy, rather than the website. scale that up to the amount of kit your looking to buy and i think you would be chuffed! the aftersales support we have received has also been very good.
 
Yeah, the online quote was just to give me a ball park list price and also to see what options I'd want on boxes etc.

I'm not intending to pay anything near the list price ;)
 
microsoft offer charitys very cheap pricing on licensing for operating systems, office etc.

Its the same as achidemic pricing so windows costs like £25 or something stupid like that.

Server 08 is £80 iirc.

Dell will be cheaper than HP, but i personally prefer HP.

Ebay is best bet for a cheap server. Loal computer shops will do cheap pc's.

Phil
 
PHILIP1193 said:
microsoft offer charitys very cheap pricing on licensing for operating systems, office etc.

Its the same as achidemic pricing so windows costs like £25 or something stupid like that.

Server 08 is £80 iirc.

Dell will be cheaper than HP, but i personally prefer HP.

Ebay is best bet for a cheap server. Loal computer shops will do cheap pc's.

Phil
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Yer we have had good quotes from people like ctinexus and ctxchange for all the software we will need, works out at under £40 per desktop machine for XP Pro and Office 2007 Pro :)

Not going to go near eBay or local shops for the machines, that is how things are done at the moment and its ****ing pants.

They have a serious amount of money to throw at redoing the whole thing properly so I'm going to put it out to tender to big suppliers like HP and Dell and see who comes up with the best package for hardware and also support.

I'd also prefer to go to HP for it even if they cost more as I have generally found their after sales support to be far better and also their warranty terms are nicer too.
 
Call a couple of local resellers rather than talking to just the vendors. I used to work for an IT reseller and charity discounts on software are usually very generous. Not so much on hardware as margins are low but you are looking at a reasonable amount of kit so you should be able to get a pretty good deal.

drop me an email if you want some contact details for some reliable people (I'm in New Zealand now so I might take a few hours to reply though)
 
rixarena said:
just out of curiousity where is the church based? i didnt think churches had much money.

Regards Sam
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NW England, I guess that is usually the case, but this one appears to have some money to spend. They are basically refitting their building for the next 5 years and a new IT system is quite high up their list of things to get done properly.

I'm not a member of it, but my house mate is and so I've been asked to spec a system and cost it up for them.

There is a member of their congregation that is quite eager to do the job for them (and obviously he's their mate) but people have concerns that he will essentially be throwing money down the drains and doing a poor job of it.
 
ricky1981 said:
Call a couple of local resellers rather than talking to just the vendors. I used to work for an IT reseller and charity discounts on software are usually very generous. Not so much on hardware as margins are low but you are looking at a reasonable amount of kit so you should be able to get a pretty good deal.

drop me an email if you want some contact details for some reliable people (I'm in New Zealand now so I might take a few hours to reply though)
Click to expand...


Thanks for the offer Ricky, once I know that I'm going to be the person responsible for doing this job (there seems to be a lot of internal politics about whether me the heathen and non-member should do their IT install or not!) I might take you up on the offer of a few people to call.
 
Also, before you buy direct from Dell or HP, talk to big resellers. Many do cashback deals on certain machines or have heavily discounted end of line machines.
 
I've only used IBM and Dell and I would say Dell support is better. Most of the kit is tidy too. Got an old shed of a PE2800 here that is a few years old I imagine and it massively outperforms (io) say, for example, an X226 I was using a few years ago. In fact, most of the IBM stuff before the 8k cards was pretty sheite, imo.
 
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