A HAMPSHIRE computer firm has won a hard fought tender battle to supply support services to Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust worth up to £5.5m.

A "stringent" five-month selection process saw Fareham's Taylor Made Computer Solutions awarded its first significant NHS contract.

Worth £100,000 a year, but with the possibility of a further £1m annual hardware sales, TMCS hopes the deal will unlock other areas of the NHS, one of the biggest IT users in Britain.

Bosses now aim to double their £6m turnover in the next three years on NHS work alone and expect to hire extra staff to cope with the work.

The contract, which initially runs for three years but has an option to extend to five, is to support and maintain servers and printers used by Fareham's St Christopher Hospital as well as Portsmouth's Queen Alexandra and St Mary's hospitals.

In total, the firm will be working across more than 80 NHS sites in South East Hampshire. Major national player Harmony - formerly known as World Class International previously held the contract.

The win is a vindication of a long running strategy to break into the "closed" NHS market and is already seeing benefits with a trickle of other regional healthcare IT support deals starting to flow.

Lucrative It's just the start. Now TMCS is on an approved supplier list they plan to land IT work at doctors' surgeries and dentists across the region and are now turning their sights on lucrative Hampshire NHS IT work.

Founder and managing director Nigel Taylor said: "This is a potentially huge contract. The hardware and software side is potentially worth £1m a year but the exciting part is that it opens up the enormous possibilities in the NHS.

"It is quite a closed shop and you have to be on an approved list and to do that you have to do some work for them.

"For two or three years we have been working to get closer to them.

"This is a massive springboard for us. For example Hampshire NHS is very much a target for us now and Portsmouth NHS is a door opener for us."

Phil Kenney, ICT Technical Services Manager for the NHS Trust said: "Clearly the efficient and effective operation of our IT systems is vitally important to us so we needed a technology supplier who could maximise uptime, minimise downtime and react quickly to our needs while delivering good value. Taylor Made were able to demonstrate their capability to do just that."

Familiar through its 36 branded vehicles, the 13-year-old firm employs 73 people and derives 40 per cent of its work from the legal sector where it boasts clients such as Warner Goodman Streat, Moore and Blatch, Trethowans, Blake Lapthorne Tarlo Lyons and Coffin Mew and Clover.