While it is striving to complete migration from incumbent IT infrastructure, the environment department will continue to work with one of the key suppliers, across two deals worth almost £50m
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is nearing the conclusion of a multimillion-pound programme to exit legacy datacentres, but has retained one of the major incumbent suppliers for a new £40m deal to provide “capability as a service”.
On 1 March, Defra entered a 19-month £9m deal with Capgemini – which, alongside IBM, has been one of the department’s long-standing suppliers of datacentre hosting services.
“This contract is to conclude the remaining exit activities for three contracts to exit the incumbent supplier’s datacentres and migrate a small number of services into a replacement contract,” a new commercial notice says.
Many of the services previously hosted in these datacentres will, in the future, operate from a cloud environment, with Defra having spent about £30m in recent years on contracts with Amazon Web Services.
But, while it may be moving away from the legacy environments previously provided by Capgemini, the French IT giant will remain a major commercial partner of the environment department.
On 9 February, the two parties signed a four-year agreement for the provision of a “capability-as-a-service” offering for digital, data, and technology expertise.
Up to £40m will be spent through the engagement – although the text of contract reveals that at least 30% of this must be sub-contracted by Capgemini to SMEs. The document specifies three UK-based firms that will support delivery of the deal: Sanderson; Tecknuovo; and Burendo.
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The agreement is intended to offer an on-demand “resourcing model for bringing in external resources through suppliers with the capabilities to fill in a skills or resource need or increase capacity on a specific project or to deliver required outcomes on a fixed-term basis”, according to the contract.
The expertise covered by the deal will primarily fall under the banner of “technical” skills, which “comprises capabilities which would primarily be found within the architecture, software development, and quality assurance and testing sections of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework”, the document adds.
The type and volume of additional personnel and resources required by Defra will be specified in discrete statements of work issued by the department’s internal digital unit.
The contract outlines a range of benefits the contract is intended to provide, including: “ensuring value-driven delivery; sustainable resourcing models; optimal delivery models; and balancing innovation and efficiency”.
The engagement will help in “overcoming the difficulty of establishing a long-term, sustainable resourcing approach by effectively leveraging strategic suppliers, ensuring scalability and flexibility whilst adapting without compromising quality”, while also assisting with “navigating the complexity of identifying and implementing the most efficient and appropriate delivery models to achieve the best outcomes” for tech and digital services, the according to the text of the contract.
“Defra Digital, Data, Technology and Security (DDTS) would like to implement a procurement model for existing capability-as-a-service (CaaS)… contracts,” the document adds. “The ambition is to procure long term, strategically aligned contracts which provide the resources, skills and capabilities required through CaaS. This will enable DDTS to continue to deliver its long-term strategic aims.”
