The Authority requires the procurement of the requirement for a Sustainment and Retirement of Legacy Logistics Information Services Provider.

Procurement Act 2023

Direct award The Ministry of Defence (the “Authority”) intends to award a contract to Boeing Defence UK Limited (“the Supplier”) for the provision of a ‘Sustainment Provider’ service and its support of the Bridging the Gap (“BtG”) solution (the “Service”). The BtG estate is a bespoke and interconnected defence information environment comprising approximately sixty remaining legacy applications. The applications exchange information through a complex network of interfaces and middleware and support defence logistics, inventory, engineering, munitions, maritime and aviation activities. The proposed contract concerns the continued operation, support, maintenance, integration, data extraction and migration of the existing BtG services. Its purpose is to preserve essential service continuity while enabling the controlled transition, disaggregation and retirement of the BtG estate, already underway under the existing contract. This proposed contract is an extension to, and partial replacement of, those services while applications and services are progressively migrated, disaggregated and retired. The proposed contract has an initial term of three (“3”) years, with two optional one (“1”) year extensions, totalling five (“5”) years with an estimated maximum value of £354 million (including VAT). In accordance with Section 41(1)(a) of the Procurement Act 2023 (the “Act”), the Authority intends to rely on the Single Supplier direct award justification, as set out in Paragraph 6 and Paragraph 7 of Schedule 5 of the Act, to award a public contract directly to the Supplier not being an excluded Supplier. It is considered that a direct award is permissible under the Act on the basis that, due to an absence of competition for technical reasons and the incompatibility of services by alternative suppliers, only the Supplier can carry out the Service and there are no alternatives to those goods, services or works for the reasons set out below. For the purposes of paragraph 6 of Schedule 5 of the Act, there is no reasonable alternative to the Supplier to deliver the proposed contract’s requirement as: Only the Supplier holds the required technical and operational knowledge of this highly bespoke and interconnected defence information ecosystem that the Service comprises of. No alternative supplier has the technical capabilities through skill, knowledge and experience to recreate and assure the existing operational arrangements, maintain continuity of live services while simultaneously supporting migration, disaggregation and retirement of the operations. Therefore, the Supplier is the only supplier able to deliver the Service for the continued operation, support, maintenance, integration, data extraction and migration of the current BtG service. For the purposes of paragraph 7 of Schedule 5 of the Act, a change in supplier would result in services incompatible with the existing Service and would result in disproportionate technical difficulties in operation and/or maintenance of the Service, as: The proposed contract relates to the provision of services which are intended as an extension to, and partial replacement of existing services currently provided by the Supplier, therefore a change in supplier would lead to incompatible services with the existing goods and services and this incompatibility would result in disproportionate technical difficulties in operation or maintenance arising from the technical discovery, redesign, knowledge transfer, interface and middleware assurance, testing and operational validation required, and would create associated risks to interoperability, data integrity, service continuity and migration. Further, changing supplier from the existing supplier would require these technical, integration and service-management arrangements to be transferred, re-established, tested and assured while the environment remained live and continued to support migration to successor capabilities. This would further create a material risk that the Service and integration arrangements received by the Authority would be different from, or incompatible with, the existing services. Accordingly, the Supplier is considered as the only supplier that can provide the Service and there are no alternatives to this Supplier of the Service as required by the Authority. The Supplier is not an excluded supplier. A Contract Award Notice and Contract Details Notice will follow in accordance with Procurement Act 2023.

Defence security