Two unique bidders and five associations of companies, interested in the contract worth over half a billion lei for the government cloud. The STS Center in Sibiu, included in the project

Well-known telephone companies, but also companies in the field of software development and IT solutions have joined the fight for the contract of over 570 million lei put up for grabs by the Special Telecommunications Service (STS). In total, seven business associations submitted bids in the procurement procedure for the project “Internal ICT Cloud Solutions and Products (processing equipment, storage, backup, network and connectivity, Cloud IaaS solution, Cloud PaaS solution), including installation services , configuration, commissioning, operationalization, integration at the service level and training” for the realization of the project “Implementation of the Governmental Cloud infrastructure”, financed by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of the European Union.

More precisely, 576,286,068 lei is the estimated value of the project that provides for the development of the governmental cloud infrastructure in four data centers – Bucharest, Cristian (Brașov), Sibiu and Giroc (Timiș).

The purchase involves, among other things, various categories of equipment and services, with minimum and maximum quantities specified for each category: they include various types of servers, storage equipment, network switches, software solutions and other components necessary for the Cloud infrastructure. The procurement procedure is based on the criterion of the best quality-price ratio, with a contract duration of 24 months. The purchase does not allow variants and does not include contract renewal options.

Officially, this project aims to modernize and streamline public services through the use of advanced cloud technologies, which will bring significant improvements in the way government institutions operate, STS states in the specifications.

Anticipated benefits include streamlining government processes by centralizing and simplifying IT infrastructure; increasing data security and storage and processing capacity; improving the accessibility and availability of public services for citizens, etc.

According to the information on the public procurement platform, seven offers were registered within this procedure – two from companies and another five from associations of companies. Orange Romania and Dante International SA, the company behind eMAG, are the two unique offers. The other five associations are as follows: Metaminds (leader) and Trencadis Corp SRL; Datanet Systems (leader), Sekom Iletisim Sistemleri Sanayi ve Ticaret AS and Soitron; Vodafone Romania (leader) and Vodafone Net Iletișim Hizmetleri; Kontron Services Romania (leader), taikun.cloud and Trend Import Export; Dataware Consulting SRL (leader), Dendrio Solutions, Arctic Stream and SC Data Core Systems SRL.

Until June 26 is the deadline for evaluating offers from a financial and technical point of view.

The Special Telecommunications Service (STS) inaugurated in November 2022 the Data Center from Sibiu, which is to become part of the infrastructure of the Romanian Governmental Cloud, a set of IT, communications and cyber security resources, owned by the Romanian state. The government promised that it will bring together the central public administration institutions in a secure and consolidated IT architecture, and the new center in Sibiu will interconnect high-capacity networks that ensure secure communication services for beneficiaries and will increase the availability of IT&C services used by public institutions and those of the national defense system, public order and national security.

The STS Center in Sibiu is called “Essential Services Center for Communications and Information Technology”.

According to the specialized language, “government cloud” means “government infrastructure in the cloud” or “government services in the cloud” or in other words – “government infrastructure based on distributed computing technologies” or “government services based on network computing”

In other words, the object of the purchase includes the provision of internal Cloud technical, IT and communication solutions and products, i.e. processing, storage, backup, network and connectivity equipment, Cloud IaaS and PaaS solutions (IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service means renting IT infrastructure (servers, storage, network) via the Internet; PaaS – Platform as a Service: online platform for developing and running applications without managing hardware infrastructure – nn), along with installation, configuration, commissioning, operationalization, service level integration and training services.

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