The Department for Work and Pensions has retained a specialist supplier to provide planning, oversight and delivery support with plans to decommission ageing computing hardware and move to the cloud

The Department for Work and Pensions has signed a near-£3m deal to access strategic and project-management support for a programme to retire legacy on-premises computing hardware and move systems to the cloud.

Newly released procurement documents reveal that, at the start of this month, the DWP entered into a two-year agreement with Pixel Global – an Oxfordshire-based firm that specialises in overseeing transformation programmes, as well as supporting organisations with procurement.

The contract, which can be extended by a further year at the department’s discretion, covers the provision of “delivery-enablement and cloud-architecture services” to support the ongoing rollout of the DWP’s Hybrid Hosting Transformation Programme (HHTP). According to previously published commercial information, the programme is dedicated to efforts to “refresh existing ageing infrastructure” in DWP-operated datacentres, as well as retiring some infrastructure and adopting cloud services instead.

Pixel Global will assist with the delivery of the upgrade scheme via the provision of services in three key areas, according to the text of the firm’s contract with the department. These areas cover project-management support for the lifespan of HHTP: from planning stages through to the ongoing management of new infrastructure environments.

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The first of these areas covers support for “planning and executing infrastructure-decommissioning… and disposal within OPH [on-premises hosting]… defining cloud strategies aligned with programme goals, and architecting resilient cloud solutions for the complex OPH workloads”.

The second specified area is “services [that] encompass migration planning, security implementation, and cost optimisation, ensuring smooth transitions, regulatory compliance, and efficient resource utilisation”.

The final area, the contract says, relates to “collaboration, continuous improvement, and training initiatives [to] drive DWP service take-on of the new cloud services, effective communication, innovation, and skill development for business-as-usual teams who will be managing the cloud services and architecture once HHTP has been closed down”

Across these three areas, the supplier will be expected to fulfil various individual statements of work issued by department during the next two years. These discrete requirements will be comprised of “contracted-out services”, which will specify an outcome or other deliverable to be achieved for a fixed price, and “resource-driven services”, for which the Pixel Global will bill the DWP for time and materials.

A maximum of £2.8m, including VAT, will be spent during the contract’s initial 24-month term.