The Police Service of Northern Ireland has agreed a five-year support and maintenance contract for its information-management system.
The deal covering the force’s Niche Police Records Management System (RMS), is worth £3.9m according to a transparency note published in the Official Journal of the European Union. It runs until March 5, 2021.
In an OJEU transparency statement, PSNI said the contract had been agreed as a negotiated direct award as Niche retained the intellectual property rights to the software and no-one else had the authority to modify the RMS source code to affect any changes.
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“The unique source code and/or other proprietary data which are essential for the majority of the support services are the property of Niche Technology UK Limited or its affiliate Niche Inc,” it said.
“The unique source code and/or other proprietary data cannot be accessed or released by any other supplier. Consequently Niche UK is the only company capable of, and permitted to, support the software.”
According to Niche, around 100 police forces and other crime agencies across the world use its RMS, which is incident-centric and manages information in relation to core policing details, such as location, people involved, vehicles involved and relevant property.
Niche’s global headquarters is in Winnipeg, Canada, but it has a UK office in Stockton-on-Tees.
