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Viglen Wins Major UK School Software Licensing Contract

By David Delony, Contributing Writer

The British IT firm Viglen announced that it has become part of the Crescent Purchasing Consortium (CPC (News - Alert)) education framework, allowing schools across the United Kingdom to easily license software.

"This is yet another education framework approval for Viglen, showing our commitment and capability within the sector.  Our achievement of being present on all four lots shows the breadth of our offering to meet a wide variety of customer needs,” said Viglen chief executive Bordan Tkachuk.  “We already have a strong and loyal customer base through the CPC members and this win will allow us to build on that by providing best value access to Microsoft (News - Alert) and Adobe software licensing services.”

Viglen has agreements to procure licenses in four of the CPC’s “lots”: Microsoft licensing, Adobe (News - Alert) licensing, other off-the-shelf software and a “one stop shop” kit.

CPC covers a number of educational institutions across the U.K., including sixth form and further education colleges (roughly equivalent to the junior and senior years of high school in the U.S.).  Most of the CPC’s schools are academies, schools that were created by the Labour government from 1997-2010 to replace poorly-performing secondary schools.

The contract will last three years, from July 2014 through the end of August 2017, with the possibility of extending the contact to 2018. The contract will be for 100 million pounds each year, or $163.1 million.

The move will make it easier for more schools to license software that students will use when they move out into the workforce, whether office software by Microsoft or creative tools from Adobe.

In other news, Viglen won a £4 million ($6.5 million) to design and provision a turnkey high performance computing, storage and networking solution to upgrade JASMIN, an environmental analysis and simulation facility run by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) on behalf of NERC (News - Alert) (Natural Environment Research Council).