Street Lighting Central Management System

Single Suppliers Intellectual Property Exclusive Rights; Additional Repeat Extension Partial Replacement; Additional Repeat Further Following Competitive Procedure

The Exedra platform is proprietary software, with the intellectual Property and Proprietary Rights wholly owned and maintained by Urbis Schreder. They alone are legally permitted to provide updates, security patches, and technical support. Licensing restrictions prohibit third-party modification or maintenance, and access to source code or data structures is unavailable outside the supplier's ecosystem. The Exedra Platform has been in use by the council for the past five (5) years and has been fully integrated into the council infrastructure. It also has APIs that allows it to link seamlessly with the EAM application, Confirm. Any attempt to rip it out of the council's infrastructure or replace it with a different CMS would expose the council to undue economic hardship in terms of the change management, application cost, installation, configuration, data migration, systems integration, operational disruption, and ongoing administration and training. The council will incur expenses exceeding £2,300,000.00 plus costs for removing the current system which considering the council's current economic situation should be avoided.

A Direct award to Urbis Schreder for the Exedra platform can be justified under Schedule 5 of the Procurement Act of 2023 based on the following-

• 5(5)(a) - "due to a particular supplier having intellectual property rights or other exclusive rights, only that supplier can supply the goods, services or works required" (as the Exedra platform is the intellectual property of Urbis Schreder)
• 5(7)(a) - "a change in supplier would result in the contracting authority receiving goods, services or works that are different from, or incompatible with, the existing goods, services or works, and" (as this is repeated goods)
• 5(7)(b) - "the difference or incompatibility would result in disproportionate technical difficulties in operation or maintenance." (as this is repeated goods)