HMS Licence Renewal

Description

The contract relates to a 12-month renewal of an existing licencing and support contract with Avolin, supplier of HIE’s HMS Onyx software. This software has been customised for HIE’s purposes and no other software supplier is in a position to provide the licencing and any technical support that HIE may require. HIE is currently developing a new CRM system that will replace the HMS within the 12 month licence period so this is anticipated to be the last renewal with Avolin. We note the following reasons for the direct award as per Regulation 6(1)(b)(ii) of the Procurement (Scotland) Regulations 2016: “ (ii) competition is absent for technical reason”: the supplier is the sole supplier of the software in use by HIE. It is a proprietary product. “but only, in the case of paragraphs (ii) and (iii), where no reasonable alternative or substitute exists and the absence of competition is not the result of an artificial narrowing down of the parameters of the procurement”: there is no reasonable alternative in the short term. As noted previously, HIE is developing a new CRM system that is planned to replace the current solution within this contract period. In practical terms, a substitute does not exist at the point of licence renewal.It is not something HIE has created to distort competition.