Public procurement notice: Modification Of A Contract/Concession During Its Term
Published: 2021-08-06
Buyer: Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 72251000: Disaster recovery services

Technical requirements: Contract awarded for an IT Disaster Recovery solution to provide resilience for key systems and applications. The solution enables the recovery of HP and Sun servers (and the appropriate data related to them) from a Netbackup based disc and tape backup system. The Backups are taken over private Ethernet connection from the Council's Data Centre to storage on the supplier’s site.
The supplier currently provides these services to the authority under a contract due to expire on 31 July 2021.
Any appeals should be promptly brought to the attention of the contracting authority by emailing the namedcontact in Section I.1 above,and will be dealt with in accordance with the requirements of the Public ContractsRegulations 2015. Any appeals must be brought within the timescale specified by the applicable law, including,without limitation, the Public Contract Regulations 2015. In accordance with such Regulations, the contractingauthority will also incorporate a minimum 10 calendar day standstill period from the date information on theaward of contract is communicated to tenderers
The contract is for the extension of an existing IT Disaster Recovery solution which provides resilience for key systems and applications. The solution enables the recovery of HP and Sun servers (and the appropriate data related to them) from a Netbackup based disc and tape backup system. The Backups are taken over private Ethernet connection from the Council's Data Centre to storage on the supplier’s site.
The contract to fulfil the requirement described above commenced on 1 August 2017. The contract provided for an initial 2 year term with an option to extend for TWO further 1 Year periods. The options to extend have been exercised and the contract is currently due to expire on 31 July 2021.
This notice confirms that an extension of 12 months until 31 July 2022 has become necessary due to the impact of COVID 19 upon the future delivery of IT services at the Authority. We can confirm that the specification, pricing and terms and conditions of the original agreement will not be altered, with the sole modification being the change to contract duration (to be charged at existing contract rates).
The modification is limited to extending the contract duration for a further 12 months using the existing annual contract pricing (pro rata).
The service specification, terms and conditions of contract, service level agreement and annual charge rates have not been modified. Therefore the modification of the contract is not deemed to be substantial, as defined in Regulation 72.1 (8). Therefore the authority believes that the contract is able to be modified without the need to run a procurement process for the additional contract extension period.
In accordance with Regulation 72.1 (c) the modification of the contract shall not exceed 50% of the value of the original contract.
For transparency, the authority is publishing its intention to award an extension to this contract via this notice.
The need for this modification has been brought about by circumstances which a diligent contracting authority could not have foreseen. Solihull MBC (SMBC) could not have reasonably foreseen the occurrence of the COVID-19 Pandemic and its resulting impacts upon service delivery, IT infrastructure needs and strategy. Outside of these unforeseen circumstances SMBC would have followed a more evolutionary approach to modifying our systems and ways of working, which would have resulted in the ability to clearly define our future disaster recovery needs. Due to the rapid change caused by unforeseen circumstances, SMBC has needed to respond with a similarly revolutionary shift in ways of working to sustain service delivery in a massively transformed environment.The proposed modification does not alter the overall nature of the contract as the only element of the contract to be changed is the duration. The increase in duration would not cause the overall price to exceed 50% of the value of the


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