Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2019-08-21
Buyer: The Minister for the Cabinet Office acting through the Crown Commercial Service
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 64000000 | 72000000
Estimated value: 114000000 GBP

Technical requirements: Continuation of existing internet protocol and email services (the GCF Core Services) serving the Public Sector Network (PSN).
The Crown Commercial Service, acting on behalf of 454 UK public sector organisations, proposes to contract with Vodafone Ltd for GCF Core Services under direct award. It is unrealistic for another contractor to replace this service directly as citizen services will be severely disrupted without the GCF Core in a state of parallel running with any replacement. An open competition for such replacements is being conducted during the lifetime of this contract.
Commercial disaggregation of the previously provided GCF service has been agreed with Vodafone with the newly contracted service reduced to a minimal core to enable service continuity and deliver cost savings whilst replacements are procured separately through open competition as stated above. Non-core GCF services have been re-procured separately by end users from multiple suppliers.
The Vodafone supplied Government Convergence Framework (GCF) provides core internet services to the Public Sector Network (PSN). The PSN connects government departments to each other and to the wider public sector, allowing them to communicate and to deliver citizen services.
GCF is becoming obsolete technology. Government wishes to replace it with technology widely available on the open market to be sourced through an open market competition. A new Crown Commercial Service (CCS) framework will be the procurement vehicle. In the interim, CCS intends to directly award Vodafone a bridging contract to ensure GCF service continuity during a managed migration to the new technology widely available on the open market.
This will allow a time window of 1-2 years for migration to the intended new technology. The GCF needs to remain available to the existing 454 user organisations. It can only reasonably be provided by Vodafone because:
— PSN is a key government communication network and, without GCF parallel running with the new technology during this time window, it cannot be replaced without causing serious government business interruption,
— Government Domain Name Server (DNS) data resides on GCF and is not yet ‘portable’ to a new solution. It is being processed to remove obsolete and non-standard internet data to enable this portability,
— GCF supports the government’s ‘GSI’ email domains. These are being decommissioned but some users still support them and will need to do so for an unspecified period. GSI domains have security restrictions that are hard coded into GCF. Given its limited lifespan, GCF re-engineering to remove this feature is not economically or technically viable,
— modern email relay services of the type envisaged to replace that of GCF, use DMARC technology to prevent ‘spoofing’ i.e. manipulating illegitimate email to appear otherwise. Vodafone’s legacy GCF Email Relay uses ‘smart host’ technology to achieve this. Smart host needs each GCF Email Relay user organisation to configure their email system to exchange emails only with the central ‘trusted’ GCF Relay. If one PSN user organisation re-configures its own email system to by-pass the trusted relay, it needs all others (453) to do the same thing instantaneously so no PSN email is lost. Coordination on this scale is unfeasible, ruling out addition of alternative GCF services to the existing Vodafone service.
To summarise, in order to migrate the 454 GCF user organisations (at the time of writing), the existing GCF service needs to be sustained to provide a time window for migration. This window has the dual purpose of preparing GCF user data and functionality for orderly migration to replacement services and to enable that migration without critical serviced interruption. It is neither reasonable nor technically feasible for another provider to offer an interim GCF service. Open competition for the provision of replacement services will provide an opportunity for all capable suppliers to replace GCF once it is in a state capable of migration.


Winner: Vodafone Ltd
Award value: 114000000