Hosting Services

Concepts

• information technology
• business applications
• hmcts
• hosting services
• alternative hosting solution
• alternative hosting
• such business applications
• data centres

Location

United Kingdom: Nationally, to include MoJ headquarters, HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) centres, and a range of other locations

Description

Provision of centralised hosting for business applications, in existing data centres, prior to such business applications being retired, replaced, or migrated to an alternative hosting solution.

Total Quantity or Scope

Provision of centralised hosting for business applications used by HMCTS, from existing data centres, until such business applications are replaced, retired, or migrated to alternative hosting.

Award Detail

CPV Codes

• 72000000 - IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Legal Justification

The Authority relies on Regulation 32(2)(b)(ii) (Use of negotiated procedure without prior publication) of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015. The services can only be provided by the incumbent supplier, CGI IT UK Limited, because competition is absent for technical reasons, no reasonable alternative or substitute exists and the absence of competition is not the result of an artificial narrowing down of the parameters of the procurement for the following reasons: (a) The Authority assets managed under the contract include numerous physical servers, virtual servers, and other devices, including firewalls, network switches and storage infrastructure. Few of these physical technology assets are less than 10 years old and there is a scarcity of expertise in the marketplace for supporting these legacy technologies. Replacement parts are also extremely scarce, which can result in material delays to resuming service in case of failure, causing extended outage to critical business services. (b) The age of the underlying hardware and software assets means that the legacy applications hosted in the current environment cannot be migrated to an alternative hosting environment without major software remediation work. There are applications that have business value and work to carry out this remediation in-situ and migration to an alternative hosting solution has already started and needs to continue. Migrating these applications before carrying out remediation work requires a double-hop migration which would result in a significant risk of service failure and costs. Other applications that will retire within the contract term will be decommissioned in place rather than incur significant time, cost, technical difficulty and technical risk in moving the applications and then decommissioning them. Within the term of the contract all application services will cease to be provided from the current hosting environment and the environment itself will be retired and decommissioned, including all physical technology assets managed under the contract. (c) Engaging an alternative supplier would lead to a substantial delay to the retiring and decommissioning the legacy hosting environment. This delay would increase exposure to the risk of extended outage to the critical business services provided by these applications. This would also involve a duplication of cost because the current data centres would need to be operational until all of the applications have been migrated to an alternative platform or decommissioned.

Other Information

** PREVIEW NOTICE, please check Find a Tender for full details. ** The initial term of the contract is for approximately 18 months ending on 18.05.2024, with an option to extend for a further period of twelve (12) months. The contract includes the ability for the Authority to remove services from scope as and when required and therefore it will have a reducing scope as applications are migrated and retired. It is currently envisaged that if the extension option is exercised this will be to cover the remaining services that have not yet been decommissioned or migrated and to close the environment in its entirety. The estimated total value for this contract is up to £39,963,000 (including indexation and excluding VAT) depending on whether the 12-month extension option is exercised, and the order and timing of services being removed from scope. The extension may not be necessary, and services will be removed from scope over the term, so the actual cost of this contract may be lower than the estimated maximum contract value.