The Government Procurement Service has issued a tender for a framework agreement contract to provide hosting services for IT applications worth between £100m and £1bn. The pan-government contract, which lasts two years, covers IT services, including consulting, software development and support and is being put in place to cover UK public sector use by central government departments and agencies, the NHS, and local authorities.

The procurement, the tender says, is "targeted at provision of the applications and services required to make available the government's large, mission critical high availability services that utilise complex infrastructure with server or mainframe based technology typically hosted in one or more traditional data centre environments."  Although the framework agreement's minimum duration is for two years, it could be extended by a further two years and is designed to drive towards standardisation in accordance with the government's ICT strategy.

Source: Guardian