You didn’t have supplier management, legal and contractual professionals defining the engagement between companies? IT did that work? Because, the value of the entire contract is more than just dollar value of hardware.
I agree with the other poster that most companies these days will want to single source the hardware. So, when something goes wrong, you just go back to that single source for remediation. It’s like buying a Mac vs. building a hackintosh.
Oh, I get what kind of shop you are---we never bought hardware as a service and always run in-house support and it's way cheaper to buy extra hardware for redundancy/parts than to fork out for disinterested support. So as I said, the entire value of the contract was the hardware---the contracts are usually deliver N pieces of hardware of M spec by X date and warrant hardware for Y years with the usual 5x8xNBD warranty. And guess what, with redundant hardware and virtualisation our core services downtime is literally 0 seconds, and median end-user problem report to resolution time is about 12 minutes. We don't have time to waste to "go to the single source for remidiation"---when something goes wrong, it needs to be fixed there and then! Like I said, it's cheaper to to hire staff who know what they are doing ;-)