Published date: 22 August 2024

Last edited date: 24 September 2024

Closed opportunity - This means that the contract is currently closed. The buying department may be considering suppliers that have already applied, or no suitable offers were made.


Closing: 30 September 2024, 5pm

Contract summary

Industry

  • Telecommunications network - 32412100

  • IT services: consulting, software development, Internet and support - 72000000

Location of contract

E18QS

Value of contract

£1

Procurement reference

WP2248.1 & WP2248.2

Published date

22 August 2024

Closing date

30 September 2024

Closing time

5pm

Contract start date

3 December 2024

Contract end date

2 December 2026

Contract type

Service contract

Procedure type

Competitive procedure with negotiation (above threshold)

Anyone may ask to participate, but only those who are pre-selected will be invited to submit initial tenders and to negotiate.

This procedure can be used for procurements above the relevant contract value threshold.

Contract is suitable for SMEs?

Yes

Contract is suitable for VCSEs?

No

Description

GOV.UK Notify is a digital communications platform, developed and run by the Government Digital Service (GDS). Notify allows public sector service teams to send notifications (text message, email and post) to their users.

The notifications are typically status updates, requests for action, MFA codes, receipts of applications or supporting information, and reminders. The messages are sent via an API or manually through a web interface.

Currently there are over 8,700 service teams using GOV.UK Notify, from over 1,500 public sector organisations across central and local government and the NHS.

Notify sends an average of 3 million SMS fragments a day, regularly achieving peaks of 7 million.

Current forecasting work indicates that Notify will send 3.8 billion SMS fragments during FY 25/26 and 3.9 billion SMS fragments during FY 26/27, as Notify continues to work closely with the NHS, however this figure may vary significantly due to changes in demand.

Many Notify services send messages that are longer than one fragment and the average message sent via Notify is 2 fragments long. Notify SMS messages have a high average delivery rate of 95.7%.

Notify uses two concurrently integrated SMS suppliers to ensure a resilient service. Typically, traffic is shared between the two based on supplier performance (speed of processing) and load. Ultimately GDS reserves the right to allocate work between suppliers at its absolute discretion and there is no guarantee of volume as it's influenced by both government policy and how the services choose to use Notify.

We're looking to procure SMS suppliers for 2 years, with options for contract extension. The unit price for a single SMS fragment will be fixed throughout the duration of the contract, independent of volume.

To meet Notify's SMS redundancy requirements the suppliers should utilise independent computing and network infrastructures throughout their respective end-end services, avoiding any single points of failure that could simultaneously impact both providers. Suppliers are asked to provide sufficient information in their responses to enable GDS to evaluate this.
In the event the top 'two' scoring suppliers share the same sub-processors, The Contracting Authority reserve the right to either;
(a) Withdraw the second contract from this competition and re-tender, or
(b) Award the second contract to the next best scoring supplier that uses a different sub-processor. This is to ensure service resilience is maintained through use of different sub-processors to the top scoring tenderer.

Prospective tenderers must read the attached documentation and return via email as per instructions, to gds-digital-buyer@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk

More information

Attachments

Additional text

*Updated document. *
Criteria 10.04 has been amended to; "Are you signed up to, or agree to follow, the A2P Code of Conduct https://mobileecosystemforum.com/programmes/future-of-messaging/fraud-management/trust-in-enterprise-messaging/ ?"

Please either use the updated response sheet provided or amend our working bid document to reflect the change.

The deadline for responses has been extended to 5pm on Monday 31 September to accommodate the change(s).

About the buyer

Address

10 Whitechapel High Street
London
E1 8QS
England

Email

gds-digital-buyer@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk