Public procurement notice: Contract Award Notice
Published: 2020-05-08
Buyer: The Secretary of State for Justice
Country: UK
Contract type: Services
Procedure: Negotiated without a prior call for competition
CPV classification: 72000000 | 72100000 | 72200000 | 72300000 | 72400000
Estimated value: 27700000 GBP
Award criteria: Lowest price

Technical requirements: Υπηρεσίες τεχνολογίας των πληροφοριών: παροχή συμβουλών, ανάπτυξη λογισμικού, Διαδίκτυο και υποστήριξη
Provision of centralised hosting for business applications, in existing data centres, prior to such business applications being retired, replaced, or migrated to alternative hosting.
Provision of centralised hosting for business applications used by HMCTS and MoJ, from existing data centres, until such business applications are replaced, retired, or migrated to alternative hosting.
The authority relies on the ground set out in Regulation 32(2)(b)(ii) and (iii) (Use of negotiated procedure without prior publication) of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. For technical reasons, and for the protection of exclusive rights, including intellectual property rights, the services can be provided only by a particular economic operator. This is the incumbent supplier (CGI IT UK Ltd) who has been providing the services that form the subject matter of this contract under a contract with the authority for 5 years 11 months which came to an end on 18 April 2020. As part of a wider programme of business change, a number of applications hosted under the exiting contract are to be replaced/retired. The authority has a strategy to transition the hosting of the remaining applications to a more modern hosting platform with alternative supplier(s) and work has already started to migrate several applications to cloud hosting. There is a short-term requirement for the current ‘legacy’ hosting service to continue to be provided for a period beyond 18 April 2020, to enable the hosted applications to be retired, replaced, or transitioned to alternative hosting provision.
From a technical perspective, it is not feasible to transition these services to a new supplier for a short term. To do so would require new, separate infrastructure to be implemented and, because of the age and fragility of the current physical infrastructure and IPR in the build, it would not be possible to lift and shift or replicate the current infrastructure. The design of a new hosting platform and transition of the applications to it would require working knowledge of the applications as well as their complex interfaces and integration requirements and the new platform would have to be integrated with other suppliers’ solutions. The transition of applications to such a replacement infrastructure would thus present an high risk to service continuity as well as involving significant cost.
Therefore, it is the authority's view that it is likely that the cost of appointing a different supplier would not only be prohibitive but also that no other supplier would choose to bid for such a short-term appointment where the services are expected to reduce over the term.
The absence of competition has not arisen as a result of an artificial narrowing down of the parameters of the procurement.


Winner: CGI IT UK Ltd
Award value: 27700000
Number of bids: 1