Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2020-05-20
Buyer: European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
Country: CH
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Open procedure
CPV classification: 48610000: Database systems | 72222300: Information technology services | 72317000: Data storage services | 73110000
Estimated value: 419325.11 EUR
Award criteria: The most economic tender
EU fund: Horizon Europe

Technical requirements: This pre-commercial procurement (PCP) is carried out by CERN as lead procurer. As an intergovernmental organisation, CERN is not subject to any national or international procurement laws.
Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP) to Buy R&D (Research and Development) Services for Archiving and Preservation for Research Environments
On 29 January 2020, a contract notice was published as part of the EU project Archiver to purchase R&D services from a number of R&D providers in parallel (PCP procurement).
The PCP procurement compared competing alternative solution approaches to address the challenge of long term, preservation and archiving for scientific data in the petabyte volume range under F.A.I.R. principles following the OAIS reference model and related standards, while ensuring that research groups retain stewardship of their data sets. The innovative resulting services are expected to be integrated to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service catalogue.
This PCP procurement is a joint procurement by different procurers across Europe that are all facing the same common challenge and are thus looking for similar solutions (so-called ‘buyers group’).
The procurement was announced in the form of a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) with a phased approach, i.e. a framework agreement covering 3 R&D phases:
• R&D up to original development and validation and testing of a limited set of first products or services.
After each phase, intermediate evaluations are carried out to progressively select the best competing solutions. The contractors with the best-value-for-money solutions will be offered a specific contract for the next phase.
Given the operational requirements of deploying the pilot for testing activities with user datasets in the petabyte range, the Buyers Group reserves the right to purchase the pilot services at a similar scale for use beyond the end of the pilot phase for a period of up to 3 years.
This procurement receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under grant agreement No 824516.
This notice involves the establishment of framework agreements covering up to three phases. This notice confirms the award of contracts for phase 1 only. Awards for phases 2 and 3 will be subject to separate notices.
The procurement is exempted from the EU public procurement directives (including the EU procurement remedies directives 89/665/EEC and 92/13/EEC — see above) and the national laws that implement them.
Publication of this notice in the Official Journal is not to be understood as a waiver of this exemption by CERN.
The deadlines for the review procedures at the bodies for review and mediation shall be as described in section 22 of the framework agreement which forms part of the tender documents.


Winner: Arkivum Ltd
Award value: 419325.11
Number of bids: 15