Public procurement notice: Voluntary Ex Ante Transparency Notice
Published: 2019-11-29
Buyer: Diku Direktoratet for internasjonalisering og kvalitetsutvikling i høyere utdanning
Country: NO
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Contract award without prior publication
CPV classification: 72000000 | 72230000: Custom software development services | 72250000: System and support services
Estimated value: 3800000 NOK

Technical requirements: Υπηρεσίες τεχνολογίας των πληροφοριών: παροχή συμβουλών, ανάπτυξη λογισμικού, Διαδίκτυο και υποστήριξη
Diku (Direktoratet for internasjonalisering og kvalitetsutvikling i høgare utdanning) [the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education] manages public subsidies for international collaboration projects in the education sector. In this context, Diku uses a dedicated electronic application and reporting system; Espresso. The system is developed by and for Diku. The procurement concerns the purchase of services in connection with further development, operation and maintenance of Espresso.
The procurement concerns the purchase of services connected with further development, operation and maintenance of the application and reporting system Espresso. For further details about the procurement, see Appendix D1.
At the earliest, the contract will be signed after the 10 day waiting period calculated from the day after the date of this announcement. Any objections to the contract being signed must be presented in writing via the KGV tool, at the latest 10 calendar days from the date of the notice.
Diku considers the terms in the Public Procurement Regulation § 13-4 letter b), point 2, fulfilled as competition is impossible due to technical reasons and there are no reasonable alternatives.
Espresso is Diku’s electronic case management system for subsidy management and is developed by and for Diku, in close collaboration with the company Innovit AS, the recipient of the contract after the tender round in 2007. In May 2012, Diku announced an open tender competition concerning a contract for development assignments, as well as a framework agreement for the operation and maintenance of Espresso. Innovit AS was the only tenderer and was awarded the assignment. In 2015 the contract was extended on the background of a prior information notice in Doffin/TED, without objections.
Expansion in Diku's portfolio in recent years, new administrative systems and increased demand for better functionality have uncovered a need for further development and operation of Espresso.
Diku considers Innovit AS to be the only relevant supplier in the market for the services we need in connection with the further development, operation and maintenance of the system. This also includes additional modules (statistics module and project catalogue) and integration with internal and external systems (Public 360 over HTTP with JSON-data, economy system Basware/the Norwegian Government Agency for Financial Management with EHF-files via FTP).
Espresso is developed in Java and uses an MS SQL database with Hibernate such as ORM. Multiple third-party tools are used, such as Wicket, Freemarker, Apache commons, JMock, JUnit, Jetty, Log4j, JSoup, Spring, Tomcat, Jasper, Jetty, jBPM, iText and Hibernate.
Espresso is developed and further developed over a long time. The system currently contains approx. 200 000 lines of code, distributed over approx. 20 000 lines with HTML/Javascript in the front-end and approx. 180,000 lines with Java-code in the back end. Only newer code contains code comments from the developers. Code comments are only found for a few of the code lines, and there have been multiple developers involved in the development over time.
The scope of the system, the tight integration and the time it takes to produce new functionality means that Diku believes it is impossible for suppliers other than Innovit AS to be able to compete on price and delivery time/reliability in regard to further operation, development and maintenance of the system.
Based on Diku’s assessment, tenderers other than Innovit AS would use significantly more time to become familiar with the code, before operation, maintenance and development starts. The manufacturing time will therefore be significantly longer for other tenderers and the tenders will therefore not possibly be able to compete on price and quality, including delivery time. These factors are significant for deliveries to Espresso, where secure operation is of business critical significance.
For these reasons, Diku intends to sign a contract concerning operation, maintenance and development of Espresso from the supplier Innovit AS.


Winner: Innovit AS
Award value: 3800000