Formal documents confirm reports that the US cloud titan was the only firm in the running for an engagement lasting up to a decade and covering key legacy migration activities
HM Revenue and Customs has confirmed the imminent appointment of Amazon Web Services to a near-£500m contract to support the tax agency in migrating data and services from three legacy datacentres to a cloud environment.
The department first revealed a year ago that it was “seeking to appoint a hyperscaler to manage the migration of servers from the current on-premises” landscape. The hyperscale category includes only the world’s biggest cloud-hosting firms – led by AWS, and also including the likes of Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle.
These big five were all understood to have been involved in the bidding process but – following HMRC’s own assessments and the decision by some players to withdraw from the field – AWS was reported to have been left as the sole viable bidder, in a story published in October by Computer Weekly.
In a freshly published commercial notice, HMRC has now confirmed only that there was only “one tender received [and] one tender assessed in the final stage”.
The decision to award the deal to AWS was formally taken on 23 March, marking the start of a standstill period that will run until 1 April. After which, the contract will be signed on or around 14 April, the notice indicates.
The deal will then run for an initial term of seven years, plus further potential extensions of two years and one year – which would take the agreement’s ultimate end date to April 2036.
The deal is expected to be worth £472.8m, inclusive of VAT.
The near-term priority for AWS will be helping HMRC successfully and safely extricate itself from its incumbent legacy computing platforms.
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“The objective of the programme is to exit all services from three managed datacentres and decommission any remaining infrastructure within the current contract period of the incumbent data centre hosting provider [which ends in] June 2028,” the notice says. “The scope of the technical migration is currently all services supported by hardware in the three datacentres. Other programmes may have plans to migrate services prior to the datacentre exit date and once those programmes are confirmed, HMRC will de-scope [them from the programme] as appropriate.”
The document adds: “[This contract] will provide a vehicle to deliver the technical migration to the public cloud of services within the scope of the programme, and their hosting for the remaining life of the contract. The specifics of the migration plan will be confirmed during the negotiation phase of the procurement process.”
As well as these main objectives, AWS may also be asked to provide some additional services at HMRC’s discretion, over the course of the contract.
Such services may include the likes of help with redesigning migrated services or the development of new ones, as well as possible migration activities from facilities other than the three main legacy locations.
Other support potentially in scope of the deal could include “application modernisation and optimisation… cloud network optimisation, data archiving and purging, platform [and] service cost optimisation, application and infrastructure security hardening / improvement works, technical debt reduction, security improvements… [and] training and upskilling” of HMRC staff, the notice adds.
In response to enquiries from PublicTechnology, HMRC indicated that it does not comment on individual suppliers, but that the department works with a range of firms of various sizes.
A spokesperson added: “We follow government procurement rules when awarding contracts, ensuring value for money for taxpayers. We will publish final details of this contract on Contracts Finder in due course.”
