Watercare's Mangere water treatment plant.
The Department of Internal Affairs is in the market for computer equipment, data centre, networking and services to support New Zealand's water reform programme.
The department, which is leading the reforms better known as Three Waters, is seeking a partner that will deliver the design, build and implementation of the full solution required to support the programme's operational technology infrastructure requirements.
"A key component of this will be the proposal to develop a detailed design that will inform the rest of the project," a tender released today said.
The tender is the second major component of the programme to drop after US ERP giant Infor won the cornerstone $107.5 million role in the $532 million project to deliver its technology to the ten water services entities to be created under the programme.
Currently, 67 water boards and similar entitites deliver water services across the country. Infor is the incumbent software platform supplier at the largest of these, Auckland-based Watercare.
DIA said it expected responses to the new tender would include an outline of the potential components covered within the detailed design, potentially in the form of a service catalogue.
As well as the solution components, design and implementation services, bidders will also need to include ongoing support options for their solution.
Components included in the tender cover data centre, hardware, virtualisation, storage, internet connectivity and connectivity between data centres, and application and technology services.
Partners shortlisted and selected to work with DIA's National Transition Unit must have the ability to mobilise a delivery team to meet the needs of the programme, the tender said.
"A key factor in our decision making will be the ability for us to reach agreement of contract terms and details of an initial statement of work so that the team can be onboarded within a couple of weeks from becoming ‘preferred bidder’ in our procurement process," the document specified.
In addition, DIA said it had identified the potential for additional work for some of the ten water services entotites to be created under the programme.
"This work involves setting up secure access to existing operational technology environments where the councils are unable or unwilling to provide access through their current network infrastructure," the tender said.
"We reserve the right to award this incremental work to the successful respondent."
Each water entity must have two deployments of physical infrastructure at physically separate data centres and the entities will not share any infrastructure.
Storage to support the compute and virtualisation service will be hyperconverged, the tender said. A separate backup appliance for each site will provide local backup for each entity on each site.
Each data centre will serve as the first line of offsite backup, however, longer term and second line disaster recovery and backup will be located on Microsoft Azure.
The initial water services entity is scheduled to be operational from 1 July, 2024, with all ten required to be operational by 30 June, 2026.
