The purchase has been made by the NHS’s National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT) after it concluded that JDS represents a viable desktop alternative for certain types of user communities, according to a statement, following trials that began in December 2003.
The 5,000 licenses will be used for tactical deployments according to NPfIT, while Sun’s UK director of public sector, Charles Andrews, told ComputerWire that Sun and the NPfIT are still in discussions around how they want to roll out some of their desktop systems.
The 5,000 license contract represents less than one percent of the NHS’s estimated 800,000 desktop PCs, which currently run Microsoft Corp. Windows via a three-year corporate licensing deal struck in October 2001, but Andrews said Sun is happy to have got a toe in the door.
For Sun we are very excited and pleased that this has happened because we didn’t have a viable desktop before, so we are very pleased to get this endorsement from a public sector body, he said. JDS has also been adopted by the China Standard Software Company Ltd. and Allied Irish Bank and is being evaluated by the UK’s Office of Government Commerce.
Sun has already entered into a separate enterprise supplier agreement with the NPfIT covering infrastructure, server and storage hardware and is providing the key technology for the NHS’s Care Records Service, which is being delivered to the health services organization by BT Group Plc.
