Dell taps Wang as fed service provider

Wang Laboratories Inc. will become a preferred service provider for all Dell Computer Corp. products used by federal agencies, under an agreement reached by the two companies last week.

About 700 Wang technicians and support employees from the Multi-Vendor Services group, all of whom have security clearances, will bolster about 10,000 technicians certified by Dell to handle field support, maintenance and installation of Dell servers, workstations, portables and desktops worldwide, according to the agreement.

The Wang employees, many of whom have top-secret or higher security clearances, have a history of serving Defense Department locations, said Rocky Mountain, the federal marketing manager at Dell.

"They can get on bases and provide services and support, and this gives us an additional capacity that we haven't had heretofore and DOD business we haven't had before," Mountain said.

Dell, whose direct-sales model helped boost the company's total sales off the General Services Administration schedule last year to $270 million, needed to bolster its service and support team to meet demand after a surge in GSA schedule buying in August, September and October.

Wang has 30 years of experience providing service to the government's information technology infrastructure, and it currently is fulfilling service contracts at U.S. government installations in 130 countries.

"We've been working with Dell for a number of years, particularly in Europe and Australia," said Robert Curtis, president of Wang's Multi-Vendor Services group. "As a result of this, we've contracted increasingly more with Dell."

In July the two companies broadened their relationship when Dell launched its new line of workstation products.

Wang recorded $1.2 billion in revenue last year. The company has been out of the hardware business since 1993 and is now exclusively a service provider.