The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs has gone out to tender with a contract for IT services, including consulting, software development, internet and support, worth an estimated £325 million.
Defra is procuring a contract for the delivery of Hosting and Application Support Services to the Core Defra Group at locations situated within England, Scotland and Wales consisting of:
- Defra
- Environment Agency
- Natural England
- Animal and Plant Health Agency Marine Management Organisation
- Rural Payments Agency,
Remaining organisations within the wider Defra group will also be potential service recipients and may be added to the contract at a later date via change control.
The Contract is one of a suite of contracts collectively referred to as the ‘Unity’ programme that will replace existing ICT Services which are currently delivered under separate contracts by two separate service suppliers to the Environment Agency and Defra.
Defra is looking to purchase the whole range of hosting and application support services. These include implementation, provision, management and operation of:
- Data Centre (DC) site services;
- DC facilities management services;
- infrastructure services;
- platform services;
- application support and operations; and
- an appropriate service management layer to support the new Defra Group ICT Service Management Operating Model.
The successful supplier will provide continued access for approximately 21,000 end users to approximately 355 unique applications. The supplier will also provide a subset of H&AS Services in 150 distributed server rooms.
The Services are hosted from 5 data centres and the service rooms. The applications support a diverse range of existing business services and are of varying age and complexity. The Supplier will be required to interface and collaborate with other unity suppliers to ensure delivery of an integrated ICT Service to end users.
The contract value of £325 million is the estimated maximum which assumes a 6-year contract term (i.e. it assumes that Defra invokes the one-year extension option) and includes the one-off costs associated with implementation. However, Defra added that the maximum value is not guaranteed expenditure.
The estimate also includes provision for optional services, contingency and for growth to allow for any additional service recipients who may join the contract during its term.
Time limit for receipt of tenders or requests to participate is 3rd March 2017 – click here to access the tender documentation.