Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2019-07-30
Buyer: Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust
Country: UK
Contract type: Supplies
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 72222300: Information technology services
Estimated value: 5500000 GBP
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: Contract for the outsourced provision of information technology services to Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust (RBFT), including but not limited to the following:
— supply of personnel to deliver service delivery, security, service architecture and transition management,
— remote infrastructure monitoring, management and support of the RBFT windows server estate, application servers, active directory, email platforms, backup, storage and network devices.
Voluntary ex-ante transparency notice issued to inform of Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trusts intention to extend the current contractual agreement for its outsourced IM&T services provider for an additional 2 years from the current contract end date on a 1 + 1 arrangement. This extension is being proposed to enable the Trust to ensure service continuity for the IT service delivery and the continued safe operation of Trust activities whilst a full market investigation, and resultant procurement exercise can be undertaken to replace the current outsourced agreement, with either another outsourced IM&T service, or a hybrid model of outsourced services and in-sourcing of other aspects of the service.
Included within the contract extension is some necessary network refresh work which is being conducted to bolster the ageing network infrastructure and to support the continued delivery of the trusts digitilisation programme, which would not be able to be done if the network refresh was not committed to. Also the network refresh is required to ensure the continued operation of services at the Trust, as due to its ageing nature, it is likely that it may fail, thus causing disruption to patient care and normal operation of the hospital.
The contract extension, and the network refresh will ensure the continuity of operation of the Trusts IT services to support the operation of the Trust, which currently cannot be brought in-house to be delivered by the Trust themselves, and also could not be provided by an external provider in the market in the time frames required before the end of the current contract due to the implementation time, required to undertake this transition of service, far exceeding the end date of the current contract. Also, by extending the current contract, the Trust will be able to undertake a thorough market competition to ensure that the most suitable service can be selected to service it's infrastructure and IT service delivery for the coming years, and also to ensure that the most cost efficient and value for money service can be chosen.
Based on this, the grounds for this exemption are the extreme urgency of the requirement to extend, and also to deliver the network refresh, and also the technical knowledge the incumbent has of the Trusts network infrastructure will ensure that the delivery of the network refresh can be undertaken within the time frames needed, without time being lost for knowledge of the infrastructure to be gained by an incoming supplier. As such, the risks as stated will be negated by the award of this work to the incumbent.


Winner: Ultima Business Solutions Ltd
Award value: 5500000