Award authority wishes to enter into an agreement with a supplier of support in ICT operating services which includes rental and purchase of Microsoft licenses. Microsoft SPLA licenses should cover NFI's business of approximately 107 people. Award authority currently runs an IT operations environment largely based on Microsoft products. (Server, Exchange, SharePoint, SQL). The server environment is a mix of physical and virtual machines. Microsoft Hyper-V is used as a virtualization platform. Award authority has a framework agreement for the purchase of server and storage equipment. This agreement continues to run and hardware for servers and storage will mainly be from HP and Dell. Equipment is placed with the Award authority.

The IT client environment is ordinary clients with a mix of desktop PCs and laptops. The operating system is standardized on Microsoft Windows 7. Business support systems are standardized on Microsoft Office 2010. In addition, approximately 15 specialized systems.