14 DAY TRIAL // Dell has been chosen by the U.S. Army to provide them equipment, under the Army's Mobile Computing (ADMC-2) contact, according to Forbes. After the 135 $ million contract won by IBM and Co. (the ITA Alliance), this is one of the largest contracts involving the Army. And while the ITA is working for the defense (improving secure communications to be more precise), Dell could take care of the offense, as its laptops are a weapon by themselves. This was best seen by Yahoo employees yesterday.
The contract has indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity clauses and is an extension of the previous contract awarded to Dell in 2001. While back then the sum was 300$ millions, this year is a staggering 5$ billions purchase ceiling. The contract can also be extended to a total of 10 years. In the current agreement, Dell will provide desktop computers, displays, printers and peripherals for 3 years.
What more could one say about this... it's a deal that comes to complete the latest acquisitions made by the army, as the BEAR (Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval Robot, developed by Vecna Robotics) or the Roadrunner supercomputer (The world's fastest machine, designed to sustain a performance level of 1 petaflop, 1 quadrillion calculations per second. It was also given to IBM, after they won the bidding for the contract).
Soon, we will have cyborgs running through the battlefield, carrying notebooks and throwing them at each other, after they previously calculated the trajectory with 1 petaflop accuracy.