GLOBAL VOICE AND DATA CONNECTIVITY SERVICES

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.

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: £75m - £350m

Additional information:

Customers receiving services through the framework agreement may be subject to UK Government security requirements. During the delivery of services, some contractor's staff may be required to hold a security clearance recognised by the UK Government. This may be required for access to certain classified material and to certain sites. The Contracting Authority will offer reasonable assistance to bidders in obtaining security clearances.

Where an economic operator is currently engaged to provide services to the Procuring Bodies (directly or indirectly) they may be required to sign an ethical walls agreement.

The procuring bodies reserves the right to withdraw or discontinue this procurement and, to the extent permissible by law, to make changes to the scope or procedure of this procurement. The procuring bodies shall not be liable for any costs, expenses or liabilities incurred by any economic operator directly or indirectly as a result of such withdrawal, discontinuance or change.

** IMPORTANT INFORMATION **

All documentation relating to this procurement can be found on the FCO's eProcurement portal, BravoSolution. URL: https://fco.bravosolution.co.uk.

In order to participate in this procurement exercise, interested suppliers should register on the portal (if you are not registered already). Registration is free of charge and takes approximately 5 minutes.

Following registration, interested suppliers should navigate the portal and search for project_1077 / pqq_506.

The Authority requires interested suppliers to download, sign and return a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) before you can be given access to the main Selection Questionnaire and associated documentation. The NDA can be found in pqq_506. Failure to complete the required NDA will prevent suppliers from participating further in the procurement.

Once you have signed and uploaded the Non-Disclosure Agreement, the Authority will receive a notification and automatically transfer your supplier details to pqq_507, which contains the main Selection Questionnaire and associated documents. Once you have access, you should then review the documentation and complete the Selection Questionnaire by the deadline specified.