Novell has won a £21.8m contract to supply software across the National Health Service. This is good for the British taxpayer - as NHS Connecting for Health, the snappily-named IT arm of the health service, reckons it could save us up to £75m over three years compared with previous arrangements.

Novell's existing contracts with the NHS are consolidated under the new contract. But this does not mean necessarily that Novell is being squeezed until the pips squeak: the statement announcing the deal implies that a volume, as opposed to revenue, growth path could be mapped out via Novell's SUSE Linux platform.

Over to Richard Granger, head of NHS IT, who says: "This deal with Novell also reduces the barriers for the NHS in using Open Source, as it secures access to an enterprise class Open Source platform along with, more importantly, affordable support, maintenance and training to help our NHS staff make the transition."

As always, Granger is bullish about his procurement prowess. Elsewhere in the press release he says: "We have punched the bottom out of pricing arrangements that have previously been suffered by the NHS and the wider public sector. Local NHS organisations will be able to make local money go further for patient benefit as a result of them directly benefiting from the savings this deal delivers."

You can read the rest for yourself here. ®