Christiaan Buijisers, ICT Manager, Onehunga High School

Onehunga High School is a decile 4 secondary school in Auckland with approximately 1600 students and operating around 500 computers combining TELA laptops, desktops, servers and a small number of Macs. In 2007 I came on-board as ICT Director and at the time the school changed its decile rating from 3 to 4 with its funding reduced, and as I inherited a number of leasing contracts from another vendor.

Early on it became very clear what our key ICT issues were:

• We were spending a large amount of money keeping old computers running, while the performance did not warrant spending anything on these
• The network had grown organically based on need, meaning a huge variety of equipment of different ages, quality and vendors
• The end of leasing agreements with the existing vendor meant that we would need to replace a large amount of hardware (much of it not in a returnable state) and we would end up having to pay for equipment which had originally been purchased with only short term warranties or fix them before returning them
• Financial constraints within the school meant we would be forced to look at leasing, because existing leasing schemes were already in place and finds did not exist to purchase the large amount of hardware that was required
• Much of our IT was based on capital creep, where replaces machines were recomissioned into other roles, and then re-replaced when it eventually failed
• When leasing contracts expired it was difficult to replace leased equipment with owned equipment and so a cycle would begin of having to lease in perpetuity I got in touch with Equico to discuss what was involved in leasing. I learned about their Master Lease agreement, and we worked out options where we would lease our purchases and end up owning the equipment at the end of the leasing period.

Equico made the whole process so simple. We would seek put quotes and make purchase decisions from any vendor based on our needs, and on deciding what we wanted. Equico would take care of everything else with that vendor and just provide us with leasing documents to sign.

Through leasing we are now able to spread the purchase price of the equipment over the life of the machines and through insisting on 3-year warranties on all our equipment we can do so with very minimal repair and maintenance issues.

My vision for ICT into the future is to shrink our overall ICT budget and improve the ICT experience for teachers, support staff and learners within the school . It will take time to do this, but our relationship with Equico is definitely one of the cornerstones of making this happen.