Acer Computer Australia has secured a direct deal to supply 21,000 Veriton PCs to the Department of Education, Employment and Training (DEET) in Victoria. According to one Acer official, five resellers stand to receive thousands of "flow-on" orders as Victorian schools look to standardise on the Acer brand.

The deal, with a street value of around $35 million, will see Acer deliver around 20,000 PCs to Victorian schools in February and March under the DEET initiatives "Bridging the Digital Divide" and "Modernisation of ICT in Secondary Schools".

The initiatives are designed to ensure students across the state have access to information and communication technology (ICT), establish e-learning environments and improve student access to the Internet.

According to Michael Cefai, Acer's national education and government sales manager, 30,000 PCs are expected to be sold into secondary schools this year. With the current contract accounting for around two-thirds of those PCs, Acer expects select dealers to pick up the rest in flow-on business.

Cefai said schools have a tendency to standardise across a single vendor, so "if you pick up the education business then you tend to get the flow-on business as well", he said.

Acer has sent a fax out to 1700 schools across Victoria, inviting them to take advantage of a special education price for additional Veriton PCs through five select dealers: Histar Invotech Group, Fed IT, and Learning with Technologies in metropolitan areas; and Office People and A-Z Computers in rural regions.

The deal follows a string of education wins for Acer, including a $40 million deal to supply 14,000 notebooks to teachers in Western Australia, and independent education wins with John Paul College in Queensland and Melbourne Grammar in Victoria.