The UK tax agency has issued an early commercial notice outlining its intent to award a major cloud provider a contract lasting until 2036 and covering migration from existing platforms
HM Revenue and Customs has announced plans to appoint one of the cloud market’s biggest firms to a decade-long £500m deal to support the department’s migration from existing on-premises hosting infrastructure.
The tax agency has published a commercial planning notice concerning an upcoming “datacentre exit” (DCE) agreement.
The document informs the market that HMRC will shortly be “seeking to appoint a hyperscaler to manage the migration of servers from the current on-premise solution to the hyperscaler’s cloud environment”.
The hypsercale market is comprised of the world’s biggest public cloud hosting firms. The sector is dominated by Microsoft and Amazon Web Services which, between them, hold as much as 80% market share in the UK, according to a recent regulatory report. Other firms often grouped in the hyperscale bracket include Google, IBM, and Oracle.
HMRC’s procurement notice explains that the department is seeking to work with one of this cohort to fulfil “the primary objective of the DCE programme – [which] is to exit three Fujitsu-hosted data centres – and migrate associated services to new destination platforms”.
“It is anticipated that the appointment will be limited to a single hyperscaler, but this will be validated during the procurement,” the document says. “The authority acknowledges that hyperscalers may wish to sub-contract elements of the service delivery, but it is mandatory that the contracting entity is a capable hyperscaler who will manage the migration and hosting from the current on-premises solution.”
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The plan is to issue a formal tender around the start of May, opening a three-week window for prospective providers to submit requests to participate. The aim is then to appoint the chosen bidder to a 10-year contract commencing on 1 April next year.
The supplier will first be asked to deliver work to “migrate all of the in-scope services and associated infrastructure from the existing on-premises datacentres to the cloud”. After this migration work has been completed, “the selected supplier will provide cloud hosting capabilities for in-scope services in a secure cloud environment to ensure continuity of services”, according to the planning notice.
“The supplier will be required to provide a platform capable of sustaining business change, as well as mitigating current security and resilience concerns,” the document adds.
HMRC indicated that it has “has conducted an initial assessment of the R-treatment required for migration” – referring to a cloud project’s plan for core activities such as rehosting, retiring, and retaining.
“This [treatment] will be refined throughout the procurement process,” the notice says. “The selected supplier will need to work with the existing suppliers and relevant HMRC teams including the business teams, to validate the detailed plan for the migration and execute the migration within the agreed timeline.”
Potential suppliers are advised that the datacentres from which HMRC is hoping to exit use a wide range of operating-system software, including: P-Unix; IBM AIX ; Sun Solaris; Red Hat Enterprise Linux ; SUSE Linux Enterprise; Windows; VMware ESXi; Oracle Linux; Oracle Enterprise Linux; MWG-MLOS; NetApp ONTAP; and other “third party-maintained” tools.
HMRC has been engaged in work to move out of Fujitsu-based on-premises datacentres for several years. The department that this work encompasses the migration of more than 500 services to new cloud environments.
