IT services outsourcer Getronics has taken a punt on the poker machine industry and won, walking away with a lucrative $73 million deal over six years to service and maintain a fleet of 30,000 poker machines for totalizer, gaming and wagering consortium UNiTab in Queensland.

The deal follows UNiTab's acquisition of NSW-based Tabcorp Group's gaming machine monitoring and maintenance business in Queensland after Tabcorp was legally forced to dump its interests in gambling monitoring services when it purchased Jupiters Casino on the Gold Coast in May 2003.

The combined gaming business in Queensland will now be called Maxgaming, with the new contract effectively doubling Getronics' scope and revenues from UNiTab which it first contracted in 1998.

The new deal also covers existing Getronics IT services contracts with UNiTab, which have been extended by a further two years until December 31, 2010, with a further five-year option.

In terms of what sort of servicing poker machines require, Getronics will provide maintenance systems, IMAC (installations, moves, adds and changes) services, onsite maintenance and technology refresh services to over 1000 Maxgaming sites across the sunshine state.

The deal also includes an expansion of support to cover jackpot and loyalty products and WAN products such as multi-venue jackpots.. For its part, Maxgaming is hoping to cut response times to customers by outsourcing to Getronics, with 85 percent of pokies being fixed on the first visit, up from an original target of 80 per cent.

Getronics' Queensland operations will also increase significantly following the new deal, with an additional 40 staff being hired as a result.

Getronics Queensland manager Allan Steer described the contract expansion as a "true partnership providing Maxgaming customers with consistently high service levels, and we look forward to delivering on a larger scale in the future".