Northgate Cloud Hosting Solution - VEAT Notification

This VEAT notification is to notify the market that the Council is intending to contract with Northgate Public Services Ltd for a 5 year term for its Revenues and Benefits system. The contract is not to procure a new system, but to contract with Northgate to continue to provide the existing solution, and to move this to a cloud hosted model. The existing system was purchased in 2005 and is currently operating on Council on-premise infrastructure. The Council is using Regulation 32 of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, the negotiated procedure without prior publication to award this contract.

The protection of exclusive rights, including intellectual property rights Regulation 32(2)(b)(iii). Northgate own the IPR rights to the software in the existing solution, and do not allow other 3rd parties to access source code and therefore another provider would be unable to provide a support and maintenance service for the existing solution. To move the existing solution to another provider would not be possible, and would necessitate an overhaul of all of the integrated systems and a new solution to be designed which would make it cost-prohibitive.

Competition is absent for technical reasons (Regulation 32(2)(b)(ii)). There is a complex integration in place between the existing Council Northgate system and external organisations such as Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and govtech as well as integration with internal systems across the Council. The new contract will include a migration of applications, reports and schedules from an un-supported environment to the current supported version and current universes. It will also include a regular unlimited refresh/clone of the system to enable the Council to carry out extensive testing. The Council requires specialist skills for support during year end processes including rollbacks and out of hours support. Batch processes need to run efficiently so there is no impact on the BAU activities during core working hours. This contract will ensure the infrastructure is designed and tuned to improve system performance. Moving the existing system to a hosted solution is specialist support that logistically can only be provided in the most cost-effective, expedient and complete way by Northgate as the existing provider. They have implemented the system and made bespoke developments to the system since 2005 and therefore have the requisite technical expertise in this system. In terms of ongoing hosting once migrated, the provision of the hosting service by the owner of the solution will allow for direct accountability to the Council and the most economically advantageous solution which enables the Council to have access to the most up to date product functionality direct from the source.