The University of Manchester has created its own procurement framework for a collection of cloud IT services.
It has published a contract notice naming five companies over four lots based on different cloud platforms, saying they can each go into a fifth lot for any new call-off.
The companies selected are ANS Group for the Microsoft Azure platform, Tech Mahindra for AWS, Cloudreach Europe for Google, and HCL and UKCloud for others. The total value of the business could be up to £50 million over the four years of the contract.
The university says the relevant services include cloud hosting, computing, network, storage, platform- and software-as-a-service, and relevant consulting services.
It has indicated that it currently has a number of projects build around Azure, AWS and Google, and that its preference is to keep these on the current platforms due to the cost of moving them. But it also wishes to have the option of other platforms for services for future projects, which are not yet defined.
