Technical management and hardware for kennisnet's Education Community Cloud

Kennisnet has its own (private) cloud facility, the Education Community Cloud (OCC). The OCC provides hosting for overarching or central applications in education. The OCC not only provides the hosting of the online platforms and services offered by Kennisnet, but also by its partners. In addition, it has grown into a central hub from where the Kennisnet office accesses the internet via a private connection between the office and OCC.

Functionally, the OCC consists of infrastructure placed in 3 geographically located data centers spread over Equinix and Interxion. The two locations at Equinix are the core locations where the compute and storage are located. Within the Interxion location is the remote data backup of the environment. Kennisnet purchases a 1Gb internet feed (active-standby) from SURF, which arrives at both Equinix locations.

Management and further development of OCC within Kennisnet in collaboration with high-level management party

As part of a national ICT infrastructure, Kennisnet provides solid and reliable sectoral and above-sectoral facilities; With these facilities and standards, Kennisnet is, alongside DUO and SURF, one of the most important parties in the digital infrastructure of Dutch education (PO/VO and MBO). Kennisnet's offer is based on the Education Community Cloud, hereinafter referred to as OCC. With this fully equipped and managed platform, Kennisnet can serve all IT infrastructure issues, such as housing, hosting, connectivity, storage, monitoring, security and backup.

Examples of platforms and services operated at the OCC include the Entrance Federation, Number Provision, various theme portals and online tools. In collaboration with various partners, Kennisnet operates the Edurep platform, Wikiwijs, Leraar24 and Windows for Accountability (scholenopdekaart.nl). For more information about these services and platforms see: https://www.kennisnet.nl.

Purpose of the tender

This tender must lead to the selection of 1 contracting party for the management, expertise, services and hardware deliveries to be delivered in this tender for the OCC of Kennisnet. A maximum of 5 tenderers will be admitted to the tender phase.

Kennisnet is looking for a flexible and high-quality, service-oriented management and expertise organization for the OCC. Only suppliers who meet the set core competencies, minimum requirements and demonstrable experience are considered suitable for the intended management and further development of the platform.

With this tender, Kennisnet aims at the following objectives:

- Continuing the innovative development of the OCC;

- Efficient (cost-efficient) management and operation of the OCC;

- Kennisnet, together with its (to be selected) service provider, wants to be a technically reliable and progressive partner for the educational field;

- Kennisnet and contractor perform a successful operational cooperation.

The subject of this tender is the conclusion of one (1) framework agreement with a maximum duration of 5 years for the aforementioned service. Due to the national nature of the service and the possible impact of migration on the primary educational process, the period mentioned in AW art. 2.140 paragraph 3 is deviated from.

The contract is awarded to the Contractor, who meets the minimum requirements and who has not submitted irregular documents and who has submitted the most economically advantageous tender in which the best price-quality ratio (Best PKV) will be assessed.

Scope of the contract

Expected start date: 15 April 2024 or earlier if desired from a migration point of view.

For deliveries, the replacement of 2 firewalls with associated implementation and necessary licenses is expected for the first year of the framework agreement. In addition, the possible purchase of new VMware licenses is related to a change in the previously chosen license model (VSPP) and a possible purchase of other virtual load balancers.

The financial size of this assignment is difficult to estimate. The assignment value partly depends on the approval of future OCW grant applications and additional funding from various partner programs. Management and capital expenditure is expected to be 50% higher than currently foreseen in the OCC's management, investment and further development activities. The contract value is therefore estimated subject to change at € 1,400,000 (up to a maximum of € 2,100,000 including unforeseen work) excluding VAT; This is the total bandwidth based on the total contract duration of five (5) years (2 years initially + 3 option years). No rights can be derived from these amounts.