Engineering support services

Tender description

The Joint Sensors and Engagement Networks (JSENs) Team, part of the UK Ministry of Defence (the Authority), intends to place a new Contract with BAE (Operations) Ltd (the Contractor) for the continued in-service support and provision of software licences and equipment for the Ground Based Air Defence Battlefield Information System Application. This support will include modification to the software to ensure it remains compatible with the Bowman system on which it is hosted, as that system undergoes capability uplift software updates. The contract shall be for a period of 3 years, with an option to extend for a further 6 months and will have an additional tasking mechanism. This requirement can be placed using the negotiated procedure without prior publication pursuant to Article 28(1)(e) of Directive 2009/81/EC (Regulation 16(1)(a)(ii) of the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations 2011) for technical reasons. Although the MoD has user rights to elements of the software, other non-separable software elements over which BAES retain exclusive rights and MoD’s licences to those elements do not permit the Department to provide access to the software to any third party. It is not possible to view the different software elements in isolation, as the existing GBAD BISA software is a single application, which is subsequently incorporated onto the Bowman platform. The software elements are integrated and, as such, it is not possible to split out the elements, isolate them, and support them individually. Thus, the Contractor is the only economic operator that has at its disposal the technical expertise to support and modify the integrated software.