Today the Ministry of Justice has published the tender for its freshly redesigned End User Computing Services (EUC) tower procurement. Subscribers can read the history of the procurement in MoJ end user services tower procurement halted. But, in summary, the tower procurement was halted in June, at the eleventh hour, after the four shortlisted bidders – Atos, Computacenter, HP and Fujitsu - had already invested significant sums of money bidding.
The previous End User Computing tower tender was worth between £225 million and £300 million. Today’s revised tender document for the core of the MoJ End User Computing tower is valued at between £150 million and £200 million over the same timescale i.e. five years plus two options to extend by 12 months each. This tower should still be meaty enough for the previous bidders to be attracted. The question is – will any of them have decided that they have already thrown enough money at this procurement and decide not to go through the whole process again? We suspect the MoJ has been hard at work convincing potential bidders – including those previously shortlisted – that they won’t alter their requirements again.
We understand that the tower now excludes LAN, Managed Print Services, Co-Location Hosting, Identity & Access Management (IDAM) and Workgroup Collaboration, hence the lower estimated deal value. Although the tender highlights that the winning bidder will be responsible for managing and integrating the IDAM and Workplace Collaboration services with the EUC service. The EUC tower provider will also provide Service Management functions that support the EUCS.
In disaggregating the EUC tower into smaller parts, the MoJ (encouraged by the Cabinet Office) was seeking to attract a broader range of bidders to the table. However, we doubt the size of this latest tender will result in any new bidders over and above the previous shortlist. Other suppliers will though likely be interested as other related contracts, e.g. for managed print services, come to market. Many of the services taken out of the core Tower can be viewed as commodity ICT and will likely be procured through existing framework agreements, most likely G-Cloud, or the centralised managed print services agreement signed in July 2011.
