Railway Housing Association owns 1,419 affordable rented homes located within 24 local authority areas, mainly in the North East and Yorkshire/Humberside areas of England.

This tender process is for the hosting and support of RHA’s ICT service. The Association has had an outsourced and externally hosted ICT service since 2003 with revisions in 2010 to provide a virtualised server and storage infrastructure. The current service is provided by a 3rd party from their data centre delivered through a high-speed network connection to RHA’s Darlington Head Office and broadband circuits to fourteen other RHA locations.

The aim of this procurement is to select a service provider for the design, implementation and support of RHA’s ICT infrastructure and IT services.

RHA proposes to procure a single external supplier, who may be a consortium led by a single provider who RHA will contract with, for the provision of its IT infrastructure services through this procurement. RHA will be contracting with a single organisation.

The scope of the services to be procured under this procurement may include;

— Service-desk and first line support provision – including general services and ICT [information, communications and telephony technologies] support and help services,

— Hosting MS [Microsoft] E-mail system and services,

— Hosting line of business applications, including: CRM [customer relationship management]; housing management systems; finance systems; asset management system; intranets and extranets,

— Provision of licenses for business applications and MS applications,

— Internet and Extranet services,

— Networks – LAN [local area networks] and WAN [wide area networks],

— Servers,

— Storage and back-up,

— Data centre and off site hosting services,

— Hosted telephony including desktop handsets and fax machines (optional item),

— Telephone and Internet switches,

— Management of presence (optional),

— Video and audio conferencing (optional item),

— DR [disaster recovery] and business continuity [BU],

— Anti-virus and anti-malicious use services including anti-penetration,

— Remote desktop management and,

— The provision of advice together with the supply of new and emerging cloud computing, web and on demand IT services including advisory services on such new areas of technology so as to support RHA’s ICT strategy.

RHA requires the supplier to provide these services together with managing the set-up and migration.

The scope currently excludes;

— The provision of business applications.

A key requirement of the procurement is the provision of services to deliver the transition and transfer of those services which fall within the agreed scope from the current 3rd party provider’s data-centre to the new hosting environment. The appointed service provider will be responsible for ensuring service and business continuity during the transfer for the in-scope services to the new environment.

Please note:

For data security reasons, the specification that will be issued with the Invitation to Tender will state that all hosting must be done on UK soil. Tenderers proposing solutions where data is hosted ‘offshore’ may be disqualified.