Leasing Workstations - recommendations?

So, the finance committee is cautiously thinking about a 4yr rolling hardware renewal plan (WooHoo - at last), a room per year. Apart from the obvious (Dell, etc) does anyone have a leasing supplier they're especially pleased with?

Though price is an issue, I'm more interested in responsive, clueful support, kit reliability and no-quibble hardware swaps.

We've got a room of IBM Thinkstations that pretty much rock in terms of reliability, but all other rooms are inhouse builds (by $sysadmin-2). Has anyone got a leasing agreement with Leonovo?

Cheers

Pete

We use Investec who are a leasing company not a supplier. You can then go to who ever you like for the kit and they sort out the payments. I don't know any of the terms though, I just put their stickers on everything. They seem to be very helpful and as far as I know never said no to anything we have got through them. They have even come to talk to the County Finance guy who is trying to say that leasing is not allowed.

We used HP Direct. And the finance side was sorted out via our council's finance department. I think at the end of the contract we have a choice of handing the pc's back or paying a small amount to own the machines.

I'd recommend not leasing at all!

Before I came here, the school used to lease Viglens. I went through the figures with SMT, and demonstrated that we could afford the machine outright, and that leasing tied up into paying a small fortune!

I would think hard about leasing. It has it's benefits such as hardware support etc but the downside is that it can (not always) be more expensive in the long term.

You need to look at what it would cost to kit out one room with new PCs and what the cost of leasing them would be over 2 or 3 years. Bearing in mind that new PCs will be fairly reliable for the 1st 2 years, what would you actually gain?

Obviously each school is different but personally I wouldn't recommend leasing for just 4 suites if you have the tech support on site.

I guess it must depend on who you go with and your terms but we have found that when taking into account other aspects such as disposal plus the ability to spread out the payment, thus allowing the bursar to know what is needed each year rather than a large lump sum when we need. It also spurs on keeping a rolling plan, rather than getting PC's and saying that is it.

I can't believe that the deal we have is overall much more expensive as our bursar really is excellent at getting down to the nitty gritty and comparing these things. We may be a little more by leasing but that is the cost of using a service.

Like I said each school and situation is different. I only posted because a mate of mine (not in a school) had a brilliant lease plan over 5 years only to find that at the end of year 2, prices had dropped so much for hardware he was paying nearly twice as much for a lease than he would of to buy all the kit new himself.

Still - that's what Bursars are for :)

I would also suggest you speak with your County finance department. A number of LAs are now doing "equipment purchase finance" rather than leases ... NCC is brilliant, for £60,000 we pay £20000 the first year, £21,750 the second and the same the third ... no final payment and no hidden charges ...

For certain purchases it will be good ... but not for everything.

@GrumbleDook

Do you know of any companies that offer a similar kind of thing?

Looking to kit out a primary with new suite + other stuff round the school. problem is with a 8K budget each year, thats not going to happen unless we spend 3/4 years monies in one go.

Thats really good Tony!

Our LA strongly advise against leasing. They say the fine points of the deals are always wieghted too heavily against the purchaser, and not a safe way to buy. If you persist [as we did] they refuse to waste time on it anyway.

The reason we were looking at it was to get past the governors a large annual spend, as we knew they'd just authorise it 'till eternity [or so I was told].

Personally I hate the idea - commonly you pay an extra 1/3 for the privellidge.

@alan-d
As far as hardware support goes, we'd choose 3ys NBD warranty for hardware whether we leased or not - it's good to be able to phone up and say I need part "X" and have it delivered without quibble within 24 hrs.

@Grumbledook
The LCC used to do that, but AFATBK (Bursar), they don't do that anymore. Will look into it on the off-chance.

@everton4europe
What are HP customer service like when you're leasing? We've had a few bad experiences here.

@All
As a few of you have mentioned, from what the Bursar and I can work out, the main benefit at the moment is cash-flow and it forces committment to a 4yr plan.
What we have to decide is whether it's worth paying £2.5 -> 3K (back of envelope working out) extra for that privilege. Our gut feeling is that it isn't, but we need a bit more than that to tell the governers - hence the post asking for recommendations.

The only other real experience of leasing I have is with our laptops for students scheme ... we have used SysCap for the last 2 years, and are likely to use them again.

PM me for contact details.

The person that said you aren't allowed to lease is correct in that you are only allowed to take out an operating lease.

Personally I wouldn't lease anything but if that's the only way you can make the money stretch you don't have a lot of choice other to cut down on the amount of equipment you buy. Allthough at £450'ish for a decent spec machine with 17" Hard Glass TFT monitor it's not too bad.

Ben

Whats the difference between ordinary leasing and operating leases?

Wes

The leasing I have look at in the past has been via CCL Computers, and they use Syscap for Leasing. The support from them is top notch, far far better than the support I get from HP.

I pay extra to ensure all my machines have the 3yr NBD carepack, and I am lucky to ever get the parts or an engineer for 3 days! So we said to them why do we bother spending the extra £30-£40 per machine when the standard service is 3-5 days! Anyway, I am going off topic a bit with my HP rant, so I will stop there!

I will say I am working with a local school who are thinking leasing and they are looking at the Syscap scheme with CCL. CCL are the supplier of choice for the local College / High School, Middle School and a few local primary schools. If you want more details on CCL and my contact, do PM me as I am happy to give you them