Tax agency signs deal lasting up to three years to support tech teams in delivering trade services and creating ‘common framework for building, running and operating applications in the cloud’
HM Revenue and Customs has signed a near-£20m deal with a digital consultancy to support the management of “critical services” provided by the department at the UK border.
The contract, awarded to Tecknuovo, will require the central London-based firm to provide support for various systems that are already in operation in HMRC’s customs and other border operations, according to a recently published commercial notice. The document indicated that these services are run from various environments.
“The supplier will provide build-and-run services to assist and enable HMRC Borders and Trade Engineering and Live Service to develop, deploy and manage critical application services for HMRC, on platforms which are hosted either on-premises, virtualised or on-cloud,” it added.
The text of the contract itself reveals that the Borders and Trade team intends “to standardise the infrastructure setting” for these services, and “establish a common framework for building, running and operating applications in the cloud”.
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“To achieve this, the HMRC Container platform… based on AWS EKS (Amazon Web Services Elastic Kubernetes Service) will be used as [the] foundation,” the agreement added.
The contract picks out several “key objectives” that the HMRC tech team hopes to achieve with the help of the Tecknuovo engagement. This includes “increased agility and speed of delivery, whilst reducing build costs”, as “improved maintainability” and “improved access to in-demand DevOps skills”.
The engagement will run for an initial term of two years, plus an optional one-year extension. Spending will total £5.25m per year, plus VAT, which equates to potential overall spending of £18.9m.
Services to be undertaken by the supplier over the coming months and years include the provision of “detailed designs to support platform features required”. The tech firm will also give HMRC’s software teams “access to toolsets and templates required to build applications in a consistent manner”, as well as offering “ongoing knowledge transfer to… engineers onboarded to the team”.
Tecknuovo has previously won a number of multimillion-pound deals with HMRC, including previous engagements to support its border services.
