WP2248.1 & WP2248.2: SMS Provider(s) for GOV.UK Notify

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