Would you consider South Africa as geographical hosting country for services?

 Do you have user counts for Saas services like SharePoint etc.?

 What currency should be used for pricing?

It is not clear what infrastructure will need to be lifted and re-hosted to the outsourced Data Centre. Is this required? if so, please advise details and location where currently hosted?

Dear Sir or Madam,

In respect of the complexity of the offer and our ambition to submit an offer of highest quality, we kindly ask for an extension of the deadline. We consider 2 weeks to be a too short interval of time, to create an offer that is beneficial for the UNFCCC.

Thanky you in advance.

In the context of this RfP, it is clear that many specialists will have to be involved in order to provide you with a sound answer. I would advise, in this dialogue, to give an expected planning for the different steps, for instance: questions = 2 weeks after RfP is released; Answers = 1 week later; final answer from suppliers = 2 weeks after.

Those information would be imho quite valuable and give a good understanding of mutual understanding of the project.

Thank you 

The technical annex suggests the suppliers to recommend service levels.  SLAs drive both technical and service designs and as such unless the secretariat defines the service levels (or key components thereof) they are likely to be presented with different commercial proposals that will be difficult to compare. To ensure best value for the secretariat they will need to define these service levels in line with their required business outcomes as going for premium service levels and hours could drive over engineered solutions. 

Our recommendation would be to have tailored ranges of SLAs that are applicable to business requirement. This allows the secretariat to maximise ROI for each given area - i.e. that less critical server can have less stringent SLAs allowing lower cost options.

SLA (listed on a per server basis – SLAs are usually given on a “system” basis but trying to tie down servers to individual services is typically difficult and results in over engineering)

• Support hours e.g. 9-5 / 24-7
• Availability requirement e.g. 99.99%, 99.9%
• DR requirements - RTO / RPO

Ideally a technical annex in the issued RfP can detail specifics of servers currently in use (ITL servers already listed) Other Server volumetrics listed as aggregated totals (some per VM and some CPU) at the various DCs but individual volumetrics would be more helpful:

• General
  • GeneralLocation
  • Physical / VirtualHardware age
  • OS TypeMemory
  • CPUServer role (i.e. Domain controller) Production / DR
  • SLA
• Storage
  • Inventory of Storage arrays in use
  • Disk Space Required
  • Data retention
  • Backup data volume
  • Application - COTS or Bespoke
  • Service hours required for these environments
• Middleware
• Databases
  • No. of SQL instances
  • No. of Oracle Databases
  • No. other
  • Database sizes
• Version levels
  • On demand “Portable capacity” increase (p10 item 4)

In Public cloud delivery (e.g. Azure) would the secretariat have preference to own a direct subscription and pay directly for resources or would this be managed by the prime contractor.

Do we need to comply with any specific data protection laws? Can the secretariat provide a security aspect letter stating the security classification of the data between locations?

• Is the 50 km distance between data centers based on a quantifiable  calculation of risk? Could this be reduced if appropriate mitigations are included to reduce any additional risk?
• 3.2.2.1.22 – Is there an expected timescale for "on-demand" VM deployment and is self-provisioning a "Mandatory" requirement? 

 By end-to-end service provider, does this scope also include development / development support of the TRL application?

If this a Transformation or Transition of Services programme it likely has impacts on the cost models proposed such as:

• Anticipated time-line expected for Transition / Transformation
  • For example if an old version needs to price in upgrade costs
• Not all software is licensed to provide a cloud model
• Requirement to take forward any client licenses into a cloud modelexisting licenses held and agreement to speak to suppliers

To allow suppliers to offer true end-to-end support to the secretariat it would be extremely helpful if business outcomes and drivers for each area of the services being outsourced are broadly explained within the tender process.

Is local physical presence in (Bonn/Cologne) important, particularly for transition and local consulting, architecture and integration work?

=         Can you please share the list of tools that Is being used by UNFCCC – ITSM, Monitoring etc.?

 • Can you please specify if the private cloud needs to be setup in the existing UNFCCC Primary DC (or) to be hosted elsewhere ?

Please could you specify your present backup methodology 

Is there any preference for UNFCCC for public cloud services such as AWS, Azure etc?

Please provide current support metrics (incidents, Changes, Problems, Service request) for last 3-6 months

 Could you please include current tools and their primary function (such as backup, Monitoring, ITSM, DR etc.) used to support infrastructure services

Do you have any current/known performance issues in current infrastructure?  Do you have utilisation metrics available for compute & Storage?  Please provide expected future user growth for next few years