TITLE
Recommendation to authorize City Manager to execute a lease-purchase agreement and related financing documents with Banc of America Public Capital Corp for the financing of personal computers, computer-related equipment, and servers in an amount not to exceed $1,148,962 including interest, payable over a four-year period. (Citywide)
DISCUSSION
In 1997, the Technology Services Department (TSD) implemented a plan to replace all City-owned personal computers (PCs) after three years of use. The three-year replacement cycle was designed to refresh the technology to take advantage of the latest innovations and to reduce the ongoing support costs associated with the maintenance of older equipment and software. Lease financing of the replacement program allows the City to maintain level annual expenditures and departments are able to spread the acquisition cost over the term of the financing, rather than budgeting large one-time capital outlay expenditures.
To reduce PC-related expenditures, the City extended the PC replacement cycle from three to four years as part of the City’s Financial Strategic Plan. Leading information technology industry experts, such as Gartner, Inc., have found that the average lifespan of a PC is 43 months and, therefore, recommend a four-year replacement cycle to achieve the lowest total cost of ownership. The City’s own experience validates the four-year replacement cycle. By refreshing PCs every four years, the City workforce benefits from reduced downtime caused by hardware failures and from faster, more robust machines, increasing productivity. For example, a PC that saves an employee five minutes a day (including boot up, logging in, response to applications, etc.) would save the individual about 20 hours per year. In addition, the refresh cycle enables TSD to minimize the amount of staff resources dedicated to repairing hardware.
The City expects to install a total of approximately 900 computers, as well as LCD monitors a...
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