SAFARICOM PLC TENDER MAY 2024  

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

 

PROVISION OF PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE DEPLOYMENT AND SUPPORT

Document Release Date: 07th May 2024
Last Date for Receipt of Proposals: 24th May 2024 15:00H EAT

1.0  INTRODUCTION

Safaricom is the leading Telecommunications services provider in East and Central Africa. We are pursuing the evolution to being a Technology company. The company is continuously evolving focused on roll out of innovative products and services to our growing customer base. Innovation remains at the heart of what we do, both in the way we deploy technology and the offerings we give to our customers. We have a rich ecosystem of partners whom we continually evolve or technology assets to be for purpose. We are also increasingly growing our software engineering capacity as we aim to be more agile, innovative, and cost optimal.

Growing the proportion of Open-Source technology in our IT Estate is a key initiative that will drive progress in executing our strategy. We are developing an IT ecosystem that will fully support an open­source first mindset in all that we do.

Safaricom PLC is therefore seeking Expressions of Interest (EOI) from experienced and reputable partners with advanced software and system engineering and integration skills to support the journey of adoption of open-source technologies, through professional services of planning, implementation and post­deployment support.

2.0  AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

This Expression of Interest (EOI) is intended to identify experienced and reputable service providers who will be invited to support Safaricom PLC periodically conduct a review of our proprietary software ecosystem and recommend open-source alternatives where required. Additionally, the selected partner may also offer professional services to onboard the identified open-source software and offer post deployment support.

The expected outcome is lower TCO and increased agility and flexibility, while maintaining stability of our services. Our partner(s) would work collaboratively with our teams, to undertake the following activities with the projected deliverables below. It is expected that knowledge transfer will happen at each stage of the process.

3.0  SCOPE OF WORK

  1. High Level Deliverables
Professional Services Scope Typical High-Level Deliverables
• Audit and advisory, typically conducted annually Perform an audit on the use of proprietary and open-source technologies in the Safaricom environment.

Provide recommendations to address audit findings.

Recommended open-source alternative for proprietary software where applicable.

Provide estimated license/cost avoidance/reduction.

Knowledge transfer, through on-the-job training for Safaricom staff working alongside the vendor.
• Support and maintenance Under an agreed support and maintenance contract with defined service levels

Troubleshooting technical issues and guiding towards resolution of incidents.

Providing instructions or workarounds for identified problems.

Applying software patches, updates and bug fixes to address known issues and improve system functionality.

Performing regular system checks to identify and address potential problems before they occur.
• Implementation System configuration and integration testing to ensure seamless integration with existing systems.

Development and customization if applicable.

Data migration where applicable.

System and requirement analysis and deployment planning.

Performance monitoring to assess the effectiveness of the implementation.

Getting feedback from users to identify areas of improvement.
  1. Overview of current open-source software in Safaricom IT Estate

The following table is given to show the currently used open-source technologies in Safaricom to guide vendors on the expertise required in the short to mid-term based on the specific software implemented.

Domain Area Sample Technologies
Virtualization OpenStack, Redhat
Containerization OpenShift, Kubernetes, service mesh, flux, containerd
Databases MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra, Mongo, Redis, ScyllaDB, Clickhouse, Neo4j, MariaDB
Integration Apache Camel, Spring Boot, HA-Proxy, Nginx, ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ
Service Monitoring ELK, Prometheus, Grafana
Big Data & Analytics Hive, Flume, Spark, Kafka, Nifi, Hadoop
Web servers Apache web server, Apache Tomcat, Lighthttpd, Nginx server, Jetty, Ouath2 proxy, Squid proxy

4.0  Proposed engagement model

Model Details
Annual Audit and advisory with support The vendor will perform an audit, to gain in-depth understanding

of the ecosystem and develop baselines for support and maintenance.

Provide support and maintenance services for agreed scope for

the period agreed, expected to be 1-year.

Implementation Services will be provided for agreed scope.

Fees will be determined based on the overall scope agreed for

the period.
Man-day rate A rate card will be agreed for resources to be on-boarded on the

project depending on skill level.

Vendor will carry out effort estimation and deploy their staff to

work collaboratively with Safaricom on a full or part time basis as required.

The fees charged will be based on the engagement hours.

 

The interested companies who express interest to this open-source review and support MUST have demonstrable capacity and experience in the designing, supplying, installing, testing, commissioning, supporting & maintaining open-source solutions.

Responses to this EOI MUST include clear description of the following:

1)    The Vendor’s capacity to offer any of the Professional Services outlined in this document. (Audit and Advisory, Support and Maintenance and Implementation Service). This should be mapped to the different domain areas where these services would be provided.

2)    The Vendor’s level of compliance to the engagement models as defined in this document. The Vendor is also open to suggest any other engagement model.

3)    Rationale to be used to calculate the fees for the services to be offered.

4)    Proposed Service Levels

5)    Capability and proposed distribution of people to support the project using on-shore and off-shore teams.

Additionally, the Vendors MUST demonstrate the following general capabilities.

1)    Minimum 5 years’ experience in design, installation, integration, operation, and maintenance of open­source technologies.

2)    Ability to Review technical and architectural designs, support operations and enhance our open-source deployments on premise with alignment to known best practices.

3)    Ability to provide cyber security related review and configuration services on open-source deployments.

4)    Availability of a qualified technical team that can deploy and maintain open-source technology.

5)    Ability to setup centralized and in-depth health monitoring across the deployed applications.

5.0  SUBMISSION OF ENQUIRIES AND RESPONSES

All enquiries relating to this EOI and the final responses should be addressed to; Rose Amayo on RAMAYO@Safaricom.co.ke and Paul Kyengo on PKYENGO@Safaricom.co.ke and copy to bids@Safaricom.co.ke on or before 13th May 2024.

Requirements relating to this Expression of Interest are accessible via the below link.

View 1578

Important Instructions

  1. a)All new and participating suppliers for this EoI will be expected to register as new suppliers via the below link to be able to access the EoI. Please use this link to register Supplier Registration (oraclecloud.com) if you aren’t registered with Safaricom Eric Kiamba (ekiamba@safaricom.co.ke) will review your registration and feedback.
  2. b)Once registered Please log into the portal via the link below;
  3. c)https://egjd.fa.us6.oraclecloud.com/supplierPortal/faces/FndOverview?fndGlobalItemNodeId=itemNode_supplier_portal_supplier_portal and submit your proposal only via the portal for consideration.
  4. d)Kindly review all instructions on this document before proceeding to the requirements.

NOTE that the responses to this EoI are to be submitted via the Safaricom i-sourcing portal and e­mail responses will not be considered.

For any support on this EoI, kindly send an email to ramayo@Safaricom.co.ke copying pkyengo@Safaricom.co.ke

6.0  EOI Requirements for the Vendors

More details on the EOI Requirements are; https://www.safaricom.co.ke/about/join-safaricom/our-suppliers/tenders

7.0  INSTRUCTIONS TO RESPONDENTS

Below are instructions that responses to this EOI MUST adhered to;

  1. Please provide all responses in standard file formats i.e. XLSs, DOC(X) and PDF.
  2. Please NOTE that the receipt of a response shall not bind Safaricom into any contractual agreements with the vendor responding to this EOI. Such arrangements shall only come into place once a tender process has been undertaken and an award issued to successful Vendor(s) as evaluated technically and commercially.
  3. Please NOTE that any costs associated with the preparation and submission of the response to the EOI shall be borne by the vendor.
  4. Please indicate if you intend to submit this bid as a joint venture/consortium or any other joint format and state the partner in this case.
  5. Please submit your organization and staff experience information in the format provided in appendix 1 (Information on staff and organization experience) of this document.
  6. Please share accompanying links to demos/documentation on the necessary technical descriptions of previous work undertaken of a similar nature.

8.0  NEXT STEPS

Once Safaricom PLC receives responses to this EOI on the closure date indicated, an Evaluation Committee will be constituted to evaluate the responses provided by the EOI respondents.

–         The Evaluation Committee constituted shall evaluate all the responses to the EOI and including all supporting documents, links & documentary evidence. Please NOTE that failure to submit requisite supporting documents or documentary evidence, may lead to rejection of the EOI response.

–         The Evaluation Committee may seek additional documents as it deems necessary, at its discretion as part of the evaluation exercise that will be undertaken.

–         EOI respondents who meet the minimum requirements will be called for a detailed presentation for further evaluation of their technical capability, product quality, Quality Analysis procedure, etc. as part of the EOI evaluation.

–         Only those EOI respondents that meet the minimum requirements indicated in the Aims and Objectives section will be shortlisted following successful presentation of their offering/solution proposal.

–         Successful potential partner(s) will be notified accordingly.

Below is a summary of activities from when the EOI will be sent out to closure/contracting.

NOTE: These durations are tentative and any changes that deviate from the below will be communicated.

No. Activity Approximate Duration
1. EOI sent out 07th  May 2024
2. EOI receipt 2 weeks
3. EOI responses review and evaluation 3 weeks
4. EOI Presentations and Demo (clarifications and further discussions on partnership) 1 week
7. Tender Process 3 Months
9. Evaluation, Award and Contracting 1 Month

9.0  NOTE

Safaricom PLC reserves, at its sole discretion, the right to select or reject either in totality or partially, any or all proposals made in the context of this EOI. Any such decisions made will be final and no correspondence will be engaged into, other than for informing the Vendors of the outcome of the process.

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