Re: I smell rampant mendacity...
Having worked in government, I suspect the answer is they had a blanket contract with IBM and buying from anyone else required pages and pages of justification. Either that or they bid it out, with an extremely detailed spec, and no one but IBM wanted to bother.
Nine times out of ten, if you dig into a case where a government entity seems to be wasting money for no reason, you'll find they're following a rule that was meant to prevent fraud. There's a strong tendency to spend five dollars making sure no one misappropriates fifty cents, because misappropriating taxpayer funds is a pretty easy scandal for the media to explain. So requirements to follow existing contracts (so no one can steer business based on kickbacks), and prohibitively complex project specifications (to make sure the vendor doesn't pull a fast one), are pretty common.
That said, depending on the situation (was anything else running on the z10? Were they sharing overhead with another department?) it might even make sense.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
