IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support

Tender description

In December 2015, following advertisement of the contract in the OJEU (on 18.4.2014, reference 2014/S 077-133654), the Home Office entered into a contract (the ESN Lot 2 contract) with Motorola Solutions UK Ltd (Motorola) for the development and roll-out of a Public Safety Communications Solution (PSCS) application which is to be installed on users mobile devices, as part of the Home Offices ESN project. The solution is to be used by emergency services staff. It is to replace the UK's current ‘Airwave’ PSCS, which uses old technology and is costly. The new solution will provide (amongst other things) ‘push to talk’ functionality and new data services over an existing mobile network (on a prioritised basis). This notice is to confirm that the original contract has been varied (see Section II.2.4 below for a description of the variation). Under the existing contract, the main services provided by Motorola are: design of the application; interconnection with the mobile network services procured by the Home Office from a network provider under the ‘ESN Lot 3’ contract; user service/profile management; device management (provision of SIM cards, etc.); customer support and service management (capacity planning, availability planning, etc.). The existing contract with Motorola is to be varied as follows. The contract period is to be extended. Its original term is due to expire, insofar as extension options in the original contract are exercised, on 8.12.2023. Through variation the Authority has extended the term of the contract to December 2024 in order to fully rollout the solution to the users and to avoid the risk of impacting on the benefits of the service to the users. Motorola's solution will now include its off-the-shelf Kodiak product. The delivery approach and timetable have been amended to be incremental (rather than big-bang) and the payment profile has been aligned to this to incentivise delivery. Historic disputes and claims are between the Home Office and Motorola are settled. The total value of the contract is 401 000 000 GBP which is an increase from the previous 319 000 000 GBP which includes the original OJEU value of 294 000 000 GBP and 25 000 000 GBP of previously agreed changes. The increase is made up as follows: 44 000 000 GBP for the additional 1 years extension of the contract, 12 000 000 GBP enhanced support to the Kodiak product; and 26 000 000 GBP for additional capability to enable delivery e.g. additional hardware for testing. The need for these changes has arisen because the ESN project is delayed and therefore changes are required to the delivery timetable. Further the change from Wave 7 000 to the already working Kodiak product de-risks delivery and enables the programme to move to a standardised solution faster. The incremental approach enables user benefit to be achieved earlier than under a big bang rollout. The Home Office needs to secure delivery of an ESN solution as early as it reasonably can, both to avoid high ongoing costs of the Airwave service which ESN will replace; and to provide end users with more modern and advanced functionality. The Home Office considers this variation represents the best option for securing delivery as early as possible.