Government tenders for up to £1bn hosting framework agreement

Guardian Government Computing
Guardian Professional, Friday 6 July 2012 16.05 BST

The Government Procurement Service (GPS) has issued a tender for a framework agreement contract to provide hosting services for IT applications worth between £100m and £1bn.
The pan-government contract, which lasts two years, covers IT services, including consulting, software development and support and is being put in place to cover UK public sector use by central government departments and agencies, the NHS, and local authorities.
The procurement, the tender says, is "targeted at provision of the applications and services required to make available the government's large, mission critical high availability services that utilise complex infrastructure with server or mainframe based technology typically hosted in one or more traditional data centre environments."
Although the framework agreement's minimum duration is for two years, it could be extended by a further two years and is designed to drive towards standardisation in accordance with the government's ICT strategy.
Stephen Roberts, managing director of public sector market intelligence firm Kable, said:
"Bastions of Whitehall hosting will be relieved to read that the framework is 'designed to drive towards standardisation'. The cautious wording indicates that there will be little attempt to set restrictive schemas for the mechanics of data centre provision – at least not in the procurement process. Cost and capability will almost certainly remain the sole yardsticks by which providers are judged.
"With service towers now the orthodoxy for Whitehall departments, there should be an increase in standalone hosting opportunities, which are better suited to the industrialised GPS approach than desktop or SIAM. Economies of scale mean that the data centre consolidation strategy can be fulfilled very effectively through a laissez-faire approach to the supply side and a gentle push on the demand side."