Remote Access to Academic Applications

The University of Lincoln intends to award AppsAnywhere Ltd a contract to continue its provision of remote and cloud-based platforms for Windows academic application delivery by providing seamless, on-demand, access to applications on any device, anywhere.

This contract is being awarded in accordance with Chapter 3, Section 41 Direct Award in Special Cases (1)(a) and (6) of the Public Procurement Act 2023. This is for Technical Reasons, as defined under the provisions of Schedule 5 paragraph 6, as stated below:

"(a) due to an absence of competition for technical reasons, only a particular supplier can supply the goods, services or works required, and

(b) there are no reasonable alternatives to those goods, services or works."

The key justifications for this award are that despite other suppliers being able to provide remote applications and desktops, none of them work in the same way as the AppsAnywhere Ltd solution (AppsAnywhere). From the University's research, all the other solutions providers will require the University to incur ongoing, variable High Performance Compute (HPC) costs. The AppsAnywhere solution, allows the Windows academic applications to run natively on the user’s device. This therefore means that the University will not have an ongoing, usage dependent, HPC cost which is dependent on user’s volumes from when users access the remote applications, that would be hosted from within the University's environment.

The unique elements of the AppsAnywhere solution therefore meets the justification requirement for a direct award, for single supplier, by the University, because there is an 'absence of competition for technical reasons' and 'there are no reasonable alternatives'. The unique features of AppsAnywhere are outlined below:

Technical Reasons - because there are no alternatives that run Windows academic applications natively on user devices, therefore demonstrating that there is a lack of competition for 'Technical Reasons'.

Reasonable Alternatives - all alternatives have variable ongoing HPC cost, which therefore means that there are no 'Reasonable Alternatives' that the University can implement which will have the same low value running/usage costs.