Networks

Tender description

The secretary of state for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the secretary of state for the Department for International Development (DFID) and the British Council (BC) (the Procuring Bodies) have a requirement for global, resilient, flexible and scalable enterprise wide voice and data connectivity services. These services are required to connect ministerial headquarters and other head offices in the United Kingdom with their respective embassies, consulates and other office locations totalling approximately 550 sites in 170 countries. See II.2.4 for further detail As this is a Framework Agreement, there will be no contractual commitment to any part of the services. However, significant elements are expected to be called-off at the point at which the framework is awarded (or very shortly thereafter), whilst others will be available as options to expand the scope of the services within the FCO or to other framework customers. (Continued from II.1.4) The connectivity services to be made available under the Framework Agreement will include: — managed wide area network, — campus local area network, — intelligent routing function, — management and reporting, — IP address management/dynamic host configuration protocol/domain name service, — network time protocol, — secure internet gateway, — local internet breakout, — integration services, — ancillary and related services, — tunnel mechanism*, — remote access server*, — firewall services*, — global load balancing/load balancing*, — WAN acceleration*, — Uninterruptable power supply*, — Intrusion prevention/detection system*, — Network access control*. Asterisks denote optional services that framework users may call-off from the framework in conjunction with the other services (‘non-core services’). The scope of the services will include transition from the incumbent supplier, provision of the connectivity services and exit management services to support transition to a replacement service provider on expiry of the call-off contracts. The connectivity service supplier will be required to work with the provider of the voice and video service, that will be provided separately to some or all of the procuring bodies, to ensure that the end to end service meets the requirements of the end users. The connectivity service supplier will also be expected to provide a range of lifecycle and common services as an integral part of the contracted solutions including: — project services: are services associated with the delivery of change to the operational and technical environment under a supplier’s control, such as service design and costing, technical, project and business change consultancy, change management, transition and exit management, — operational services: are those elements that must be supplied under all the contracts and that must be delivered as an inherent part of all the services such as end-to-end management delivery, incident management and financial, change, configuration and service management. Estimated total value: 75 000 000 GBP — 350 000 000 GBP The Contracting Authority intends to make the Framework Agreement available for use by other Central Government Departments and their Agencies and Non Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs) and their statutory successors and organisations created as a result of re-organisation or organisational changes. It is anticipated that the initial call-off will be for an expected maximum duration of 5 years with options to extend for up to a total of 2 further years. The expected duration of any other call-offs is not known, however no call-off agreement term shall not extend beyond 7 (seven) calendar years from the end of the Framework Agreement Term.