The Department for Work and Pensions has put in place new agreements for two contracts that, in recent years, have supported the use of APIs and tracking of computing infrastructure
The Department for Work and Pensions has committed £15m to renewals of two significant IT agreements, covering the use of APIs and monitoring of tech infrastructure.
On 20 September, the department entered into an initial three-year contract with reseller Computacenter, which will provide “infrastructure monitoring tooling software” from vendor BMC. The deal can be extended for three further years.
The technology will offer “monitoring, network monitoring, asset discovery, capacity management, and network management for the DWP hybrid-cloud estate”, according to recently published commercial documents.
The deal follows on directly from the department’s previous engagement with Computacenter and BMC, with came into effect in 2021 and was valued at £4.9m. Spending via its replacement is forecast at almost £13m, including about £5.7m during the first year. If the engagement is extended beyond its initial 36-month term – and once VAT is included – spending could rise well above £20m.
The DWP has also recently renewed and expanded a contract for an enterprise-grade API exchange platform from Kong. APIs – or application programme interfaces – are connecting components that enable two software tools to communicate with each other.
The department entered into an agreement with Kong in November 2020 which, after an initial two-year term valued at £1.5m, was extended up to this year.
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The new engagement between the two parties commences on 8 November and will support spending of almost £2.7m during the next 24 months. If a further one-year option is taken, this could rise to £4.2m.
A contract notice says: “The Kong API software subscription is a key strategic tool allowing real-time communication of data between departments, services and team providing vital data to support the welfare of our citizens.”
The use of APIs – supported by Kong – played a key role in the DWP’s operations during the height of the coronavirus crisis, during which the department was required to cope with a massive spike in claims for Universal Credit. An extra 2.5 million UC applications were made during the first three weeks of lockdown.
In a blog post published on GOV.UK in December 2021, Kong field CTO Melissa van der Hecht wrote: “In under two weeks, the team built a new API to automate the claim verification process that enabled the payments to be issued on time whilst carefully balancing the need for speed with adequate validation of a claim. This meant rather than calling people into a job centre for a verification interview and manual process, a new verification API was introduced that enabled the DWP to validate the citizen through checking back-end biographic APIs; the citizen verification is now handled by an API rather than requiring people taking the time to check someone’s details manually.”
Between the two contracts, at least £15.5m will be spent over the coming years – compared with a cumulative value of about £6.4m for the initial terms of the preceding deals. This figure could rise significantly if the department takes the option of extending the agreements by a collective tally of up to four years.
