Newly published information reveals that the operation of the tax department’s Enterprise Integration Server will, over the next five years, be supported by two of the IT market’s biggest fish

HM Revenue and Customs has signed a pair of deals cumulatively worth £500m to support a major platform that manages connections between systems and services.

The contracts – which have been respectively awarded to CGI and IBM – relate to the Enterprise Integration Server (EIS) platform that supports the department’s borders and trade operations. According to the previously published commercial documents, EIS “supports the integration of diverse services such as mapping HMRC customer data between formats and communication between systems [which] enables HMRC to process multiple billions of revenue through many end-user services”.

Using its £3bn Digital and Legacy Application Services (DALAS) framework, the tax department recently sought to award two deals covering  “agile delivery and live support of service-orientated components”

Newly released procurement notices reveal that, on 10 October, HMRC entered into a duo of three-year engagements with CGI and IBM. The two deals can each be extended by up to a further two years.

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The two tech providers will work alongside the department’s internal digital teams to support operation of the EIS, including the use of APIs, messaging tools, and other components of the architecture that connects disparate HMRC systems with one another.

Government’s online procurement archives reveal that, prior to signing the CGI and IBM contracts, the tax department’s core supplier supporting the EIS platform was Capgemini – which won a major contract with HMRC in 2022.

The £3bn DALAS framework used to award the new arrangement was put in place almost years ago with a remit to help HMRC upgrade legacy systems. The deal features 27 suppliers and, according to framework documentation, the buying vehicle is intended to “provide a commercial vehicle to replace existing contractual arrangements that are due to expire between September 2023 and January 2025, and will provide the basis for letting a large proportion of HMRC future application services requirements.”

Earlier this year, the Crown Commercial Service offered a preview of plans to create a new and expanded second iteration of DALAS potentially worth more than £6bn.