The European Commission prepares an interinstitutional open procedure for IT Professional Services

As announced in the Prior Information Notice (PIN) EC-DIGIT/2024/OP/0019-PIN, published on 24 April 2024, the European Commission is preparing a procurement procedure for IT professional services, entitled  MAIA. The resulting contracts will cater to the needs of the European Commission and other participating institutions, agencies, and bodies. These contracts will cover a range of professional services, including fixed-price (FP) and quoted time-and-means (QTM) arrangements. The services encompass development, maintenance, migration, support, and operations delivered as managed services.

The contracting authority will conduct an open procedure, which will be divided into multiple lots in order to encourage the broadest competition and promote specialization while mitigating risks associated with contract execution.

Currently, at this stage of the preparation, the contracting authority envisages that the procedure will be split into six lots, namely:

Lot 1 –  Information Systems (IS) development, maintenance, migrations to cloud, operations and support predominantly in AWS;

Lot 2 – IS development, maintenance, migrations to cloud, operations and support predominantly in Azure;

Lot 3 – IS development, maintenance, migration to cloud, operations and support in cloud agnostic environments;

Lot 4 – Non-cloud IS development, maintenance and related operations and support;

Lot 5 – Non-cloud IS support and operations;

Lot 6 – IT services only with reopening, including IS development, maintenance, migrations, support and operations for cloud and non-cloud.

The contracting authority envisages the design of lots 1 to 5 so that they result in framework contracts (one per lot) addressing small-value projects, with a threshold of up to EUR 300 000.  

Lot 6 will address needs for medium-sized projects, covering all technical areas and services of lots 1 to 5 in multiple framework contracts, and featuring a reopening of competition mechanism.

This new open procedure for IT Professional Services will take over the role which was initially envisaged for Cloud II DPS 2 MC12 DAFNE (cancelled at the end of 2023) and Cloud II DPS 2 MC13.

In this regard, the Commission aims to enhance the contractual ecosystem for result-based professional services, as it will add development and support components to the existing consultancy services covered by framework contracts resulting from the Cloud II DPS 2 MC11 SOFIA procedure.

The preparation stage for this procedure is currently underway and is expected to continue throughout the summer. Consequently, the procedure’s official launch will not occur before September 2024.

The Commission has made the above details public in the interest of transparency. Please note that these details may change as the preparation phase progresses. 

If necessary, the European Commission will provide additional information as the preparation phase evolves.