IT Testing Managed Service

Tender description

The Single Electricity Market (SEM) is the wholesale electricity market for the island of Ireland. The SEM underwent significant change as EU legislation is driving the coming together of energy markets across Europe with the aim of creating a fully liberalised internal electricity market. The new wholesale market, known as the Integrated Single Electricity Market (I-SEM) went live on the 1st of October 2018. As well as building on SEM, I-SEM delivered increased levels of competition which should help put a downward pressure on prices as well as encouraging greater levels of security of supply and transparency. This transition to I-SEM has had a large operational impact across EirGrid IS teams. The systems that underpin I-SEM services demand extremely high service levels (e.g. 99.95% availability), significant integration and process automation, and are hosted across a range of internal and external platforms. In addition to that there is an overall increase in the EirGrid application portfolio size and IS teams are required to support new technologies. A primary driver for this IS Testing Managed Services Contract is the additional change management demands placed on IS by I-SEM systems. The successful Tenderer will supply resources to meet the change management demand pipeline for projects relating to EirGrid Group systems. In addition to this there are ongoing operational change management demands for Change Requests and defect testing associated with other EirGrid Group applications. Candidates are invited to submit a qualification application for inclusion on the tender list in accordance with this PQQ.