The UK pharmacy regulator is looking to appoint a long-term IT managed services partner to help support its future use of a cloud environment

The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) is currently “in the process of migrating its services to the cloud”. This work is likely to have concluded by the time its existing IT services contract expires in the 2021.

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It has issued a pre-emptive contract notice, informing the market of its desire to appoint a supplier to a five-year contract, beginning on 1 March 2021. GPhC has a budget of £700,000 for each of the five years, meaning the contract comes with a potential value of £3.5m. Minimum spend is expected to be £2.6m.

The organisation, which regulates the pharmaceutical sector across Great Britain, will require an IT partner to provide a wide range of kit and end-user computing services.

“Services [will] include monitoring, networking and provision of desktop devices but otherwise to exclude infrastructure management,” the regulator said. “GPhC will have clarity as to its future IT requirements once [the cloud] migration is complete, and further detail will be available closer to the approach to market.”