KMCIT-146 Network Refresh - Preliminary Market Consultation

Kirklees Council is a complex organisation covering a large geographic area with services being delivered across many places and other partner organisations. Our ‘internet first’ approach will ensure people will be able to access services from any of those organisations and work in places across Kirklees and with partners nationally. The expectations of being ‘internet first’ requires resilience across all of the services we offer. Kirklees Council delivers critical services around the clock and those services, some of them cloud based, need to be available as near to 99.99% of the time as possible. Therefore, we need to have reliable technology and the internet connectivity for people to communicate with each other and access the applications they use whether within a council location, a partner location or at home. We need to ensure that they can get on with their jobs by maintaining robust and fast central data services such as file storage, applications, and communication. We are undertaking soft market engagement to potentially produce a tender help inform the specification to help design and deliver the ambition for Kirklees around available and resilient infrastructure. This Market Sounding Exercise (MSE) is not an invitation to tender or a request for formal expressions of interest. The Council, as contracting authority, is issuing this request for information only, to assess the reaction of the market and thus make any future procurement process more focused and efficient. Your responses will assist us in creating a procurement process which is well-framed, focused, feasible and likely to be of interest to the market. The value of the project is unknown at this stage, therefore the PIN is being issued to ensure that any subsequent procurement process that is undertaken by the Council following the market engagement is complaint should the value of the services required be valued at above the threshold for Goods and Services. The Council would like to gain information from the market regarding several issues related to the potential procurement exercise. Further information on the engagement is available for interested organisations to access on the YORtender website (www.yortender.co.uk) Additional information: Further information on this process is available through the regional procurement portal www.yortender.co.uk Responses to the MSE must be made via YORtender no later than 12:00pm on 28 May 2021