Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2021-09-22
Buyer: Health Service Executive (HSE)
Country: IE
Contract type: Supplies
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 32428000 | 48800000 | 48821000: Network servers | 72315200: Data network management services | 72511000: Network management software services
Estimated value: 429378 EUR
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: On 14th May, the HSE became aware of a major cyber-attack which severely impacted ICT services across the HSE - the ICT systems were impacted through the criminal infiltration of these systems using Conti Ransomware. Healthcare services across the country were severely disrupted with real and immediate consequences for the thousands of people who require health services every day. Spectrum is the core management tool and has been in the HSE since 1989. The product was initially supplied by a company called Cabletron who won the tender for the network upgrade of Cork University Hospital and University Hospital Tralee in 1988 and was supplied under that award. The product has transitioned during the years and has been owned by various resellers. The current supplier is Data Edge.
i) Data Edge are a Tier two CA Broadcom Value added reseller (VAR) in Ireland. As a Tier 2 we purchase through a Distributor, this gives us the flexibility to be able to purchase through a distributor of our choice, based in the EU, as against the UK,
ii) Due to our relationship with CA/Broadcom (Over 20 years) Data Edge are able to get great discount on behalf of HSE, through both volume purchasing and product range (Spectrum, CA Performance manager, Net Flow Analysis and Virtual Network Assurance) This is the equivalent of nearly an 85% discount off list price if HSE were to procure these products alone.
Post cyber attack, the link to the HSE from the DOH for transfer of parliamentary questions (PQs) was not re-enabled. Instead, the HSE were asked to link directly to the ePQ system in OGCIO. The versions of Domino and Windows in the HSE needed to be upgraded in order to be compatible with the OGCIO system. The urgent requirement was that the link be in place at least one week prior to the first day for submission of PQs when the DAIL reopened – 9th September 2021. The DOH proposed Domino People as the company to carry out the work.
NIMIS Is a national critical system which runs across 40 Acute Hospitals. The NIMIS vendor provides a managed service to the HSE in relation to the ongoing support of the NIMIS system.  Therefore this vendor – Change Healthcare was the only entity that could provide the necessary services to the HSE post cyber attack as they had a detailed technical knowledge and understanding of the NIMIS solution platform. Additional services that were required from the vendor to bring the NIMIS Platform back on line included the following:
•	Implementing Security Hardening measures across the NIMIS platform as instructed by HSE including over 2000 devices across the NIMIS sites.
•	Providing additional onsite manual support to the system due to remote access and monitoring tools being out of action during the recovery phase.
•	Additional services required to address technical and hardware issues for NIMIS servers and workstations that required remedial actions to be brought back on line.
•	All NIMIS Interfaces had to be re-enabled and issues with corrupt messaging queues troubleshot and resolved.
This necessitated onsite vendor technical and applications assistance and project management support. 300 days service were quoted for and despite much of this work being undertaken out of hours due to the urgency of the situation the vendor has charged the HSE at the contract day rates.


Winner: Data Edge Ltd
Award value: 429378
Number of bids: 1