Award For Provision of Specialist Equipment Maintenance and Software Maintenance

Tender description

Award of Maintenance Contract for Waters Equipment and Software The grounds for justification of awarding this contract without seeking offers through a formal procurement procedure is that competition is absent for technical reasons. Under clause 6(1) (b) (ii) of the legislation, a contracting authority may award a contract without competition (only where no reasonable alternative or substitute exists, and the absence of competition is not the result of artificial narrowing down of parameters of the procurement). In this case, the grounds for not exposing to competition are as follows: the technical requirements for servicing existing equipment (including providing genuine parts) and software can only be met by the manufacturer of the equipment, i.e. Waters, the proprietary holders, are the only provider for support of the Empower and Nugenesis software packages. No independent company could be found on the internet within the UK that could provide support for these software platforms.