Government’s environment department signals desire to put in place a major deal for hosting provision that it hopes will ‘ensure high availability, scalability, and security of our data and applications’
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has alerted suppliers to its plans to implement a £150m-plus deal for “innovative and cost-effective solutions to meet our diverse and evolving needs” for hosting and storage technologies.
In a recently published market-engagement notice, Defra outlined its intent “to procure Future Hosting and Storage Services (FHAS) to support our ICT infrastructure”.
The FHAS deal aims to address the department’s “primary objectives… to ensure high availability, scalability, and security of our data and applications”.
The notice adds that the services covered by the agreement “will include but are not limited to: infrastructure services; platform services; datacentre facilities management and site services; distributed… comms rooms server management; general services, [such as] service catalogue and foundation services; [and] cloud engineering services”.
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The estimated value of the hosting and storage agreement is £128.1m – equating to £153.7m, once VAT is included.
Defra says that it hopes “to partner with suppliers who can provide innovative and cost-effective solutions to meet our diverse and evolving needs”.
While the department advises that it the engagement process “is not a call for competition, and will not act as the official commencement of the procurement activity”, it wants to meet with potential suppliers to bring them up to speed “on the current hosting and storage arrangement, our strategic direction and provide further detail” on its future plans.
This information will be delivered at a virtual ‘Industry Day’ event to be held by the department from 10am on Friday 6 September. After this has taken place, Defra will issue a request for information and market engagement questionnaire seeking feedback from providers.
The engagement notice said: “The purpose of the RFI is to provide suppliers with the information of the upcoming procurement opportunity to enable them to provide input into the procurement process and service design, including but not limited to: provide feedback on scope/requirements; provide feedback on the commercial approach and model; completion of the market engagement questionnaire to support the tender phase; [and] make an informed decision about whether they wish to bid for the opportunity. These documents are designed to gather valuable input from interested suppliers to inform our procurement strategy and requirements.”
Prospective participants in these engagement processes are counselled that “this procurement is solely focused on hosting and storage-related services – application transformation and migration are delivered via a number of additional ongoing programmes”.
“The FHAS supplier will support the hosting related element of any such activity and may input into the application review/treatment process, however the application related services are contracted separately to this procurement,” the notice added.
Tech providers wishing to take part in the Industry Day are asked to email Defra commercial manager Mamun Islam with the message title ‘FHAS Interested Supplier’. They will then be asked to complete a registration process, after which the department will provide more details about the Industry Day, as well as the upcoming RFI and questionnaire.
