Credit: Mike Peel/CC BY-SA 4.0

The University of Manchester is inviting bids for a £50m framework to deliver hosting and other services across the three main public cloud environments.

The institution has launched a procurement process for a 48-month deal that will be split into four areas. The first three sections will cover products and services related to the dominant players in the public cloud arena – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google – while the final segment will address “other cloud computing services”.

The university claims that it has “a number of current projects” that are respectively hosted in Azure, AWS, and Google environments. In each case, “the costs to move these to another platform [would be] high, and so the desired business outcome is to continue, for now at least, with the current platform and put in place a procurement route for the services which allows for consolidated and managed billing”.

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For each of the three major cloud vendors, Manchester is seeking to work with a reseller partner that can “provide the spectrum” of cloud-based hosting, computing, storage, and networking services.

For the fourth lot, “the university wishes to have available a number of other cloud computing services which it can procure for future projects”.

“These projects are not yet defined and so the requirements for these are ‘generic’ at this stage,” it added. “As a result, the university is looking for a number of providers, or resellers in conjunction with a provider, which can provide the spectrum of cloud computing services, at prices which allow the university to get best VfM (value for money) for these future, potential, projects.”

Bids for a place on the framework are open until 21 November. The deal, which comes with an estimated value of £50m over its four-year term, is due to come into effect in March 2020.