Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2021-04-20
Buyer: Ministry of Defence, C&C, C&C
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 72250000: System and support services
Estimated value: 2361000 GBP
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: The UK Ministry of Defence intends to place a contract with 1Spatial Group Ltd on a single source basis for a duration of 2 years, with options of up to an additional 2 years. The contract is for software maintenance and repair services and will provide support and maintenance for the bespoke software and applications that make up the Gothic Aeronautical Production Systems (APS). Justification for single source is made on technical grounds due to the requirement for 1Spatial Group Ltd to undertake modifications and upgrades to the Gothic code.
The UK Ministry of Defence intends to place a contract with 1Spatial Group Ltd on a single source basis for a duration of 2 years plus a further 1 year option. The contract is for software maintenance and repair services and will provide support and maintenance for the bespoke software and applications that make up the Gothic Aeronautical Production Systems (APS). Justification for single source is made on technical grounds due to 1Spatial Group Ltd having to undertake modifications and upgrades to the Gothic code.
The requirement will be for two years with options of up to 2 further years let via sixth month options to a maximum duration of 4 years.
The first 6-month option will be invoked 3 months prior to expiry of the initial 2-year period, with all subsequent options to be invoked under a minimum 30-day notice period.
1Spatial Group Ltd are the only company who can carry out the services relating to the Gothic APS Support and Maintenance Contract on technical grounds under the DSPCR regulations Clause 16(1)(a)(ii). This is due to the complexity of the software: No 1 AIDU relies on the Gothic APS software to produce Aeronautical Information (AI) products for UK Defence aviation activities on an Internationally mandated legislative cycle of 28 days known as Aeronautical Information Regulation And Control (AIRAC).
1Spatial Group Ltd own the IPR for the Gothic (source code). The MOD own the IPR for APS. The APS code is dependent on the Gothic proprietary core technology, the two are integrated and the bespoke software will not function without the proprietary software underpinning it. Gothic consists of approximately 6 000 000 lines of source code, including extensive comments. Bugs in the Gothic or APS code are required to be fixed and enhancements provided as a result of changes to the specification or new requirements from front line users. It would be prohibitively expensive and virtually impossible to fix bugs or enhance the software based on decompiled versions of this volume of code.
The Gothic APS system includes many highly complex and specialised proprietary components including the topology engine, the rules language, the computational geometry, geodetic calculations, the Gothic database etc. Furthermore, a very wide range of languages and technologies are utilised. It is not possible for another supplier to do the work because of the complexity of the software and the linkages between what is owned by MOD and 1Spatial, which would mean opening up both areas of code to fix bugs or provide a change request.
The Authority reserves the right to amend any condition related to security of information to reflect any changes in national law or government policy. If any contract documents are accompanied by instructions on safeguarding classified information (e.g. a Security Aspects Letter), the Authority reserves the right to amend the terms of these instructions to reflect any changes in national law or government policy, whether in respect of the applicable protective marking scheme, specific protective markings given, the aspects to which any protective marking applies, or otherwise. The link below to the Gov.uk website provides information on the Government Security Classification.
Advertising Regime OJEU: this contract opportunity is published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU), the MoD Defence Contracts Bulletin and www.contracts.mod.uk Go reference: GO-2021415-DCB-18083577


Winner: 1Spatial Group Ltd
Award value: 2361000
Number of bids: 1