INVITATION FOR EXPRESSION OF INTEREST (EOI)
REOI-ITSS-01-2012
Subject: Managed Messaging Services
Important Note: Companies who intend to submit a response to this Expression of Interest (EOI) are requested to initiate the UNICEF – Supply Division registration process via the United Nations Global Marketplace (UNGM) website (www.ungm.org). For more information regarding the registration process, contact UNICEF at:
Those interested in participating in the planned tender process should forward their expression of interest to the following email: with a copy to by 24 February 2012. Upon receipt of Expressions of Interests (EOIs) from prospective vendors, UNICEF will evaluate and pre-qualify applicants. Due to the high volume of communications, UNICEF is not in a position to confirm receipt of EOI’s.
Please note that no further details of the planned tender can be made available prior to the issuance of the solicitation documents. The Scope of Work (SOW) is briefly described below but could be subject to further changes. A more detailed SOW will be provided to vendors that will eventually be invited to submit proposals.
1.0 Description of the requirement:
UNICEF has 13000 employees located in 296 offices spread out through 190 countries. UNICEF NYC headquarters is the largest office with 1200 employees.
UNICEF global network connects the 296 offices, with widely variable connectivity arrangements, ranging from redundant high-capacity fiber connections to VSAT and residential ADSL. All UNICEF computers are equipped with the Riverbed SteelHead mobile. In addition, all offices with more than people are equipped with a Riverbed Steelhead physical appliance.
Up until 2010, UNICEF operated a messaging platform based on IBM Lotus Notes and 228 IBM Lotus Domino. To foster coherence within the UN family, and to ensure secure and cost effective access with a high level of usability, UNICEF management made the decision to base UNICEF messaging platform on Microsoft Exchange and Outlook and to adopt a Hybrid architecture. In this architecture, UNICEF offices with adequate connectivity would get emails from MS Exchange servers located in the UN International Computing Center (UNICC) data center in Geneva, Switzerland, while offices with inadequate connectivity would obtain emails from locally hosted Exchange servers. Finally UNICEF management contracted UNICC to act as a Managed Messaging Service Provider (abbreviated as MMSP for the rest of this document) for UNICEF whether users get emails from UNICC datacenters or from locally-hosted MS Exchange servers.
At present, all NYC users, (fewer than 10% of all UNICEF users) have been migrated to MS Outlook 2010 while the corresponding Exchange servers (in version 2007) are hosted in UNICC’s Data centers.
Within the context of the market consultation, UNICEF's Strategy remains to base messaging on MS Outlook and MS Exchange in the type of hybrid architecture described above, while benefitting from the services of a MMSP.
This EOI and subsequent RFPS are meant to identify such MMSP, who will help UNICEF migrate its outside-NYC users to Outlook and who will service all UNICEF whether getting their emails from servers hosted in a MMSP data center or from server locally-hosted in a field office.
The following definitions apply:
· Messaging Services are the combination of:
o Email Services based on the latest versions of Outlook (at the moment of writing, 2010) and Exchange (at the moment of writing, 2010), and;
o Basic Unified Communications, based on MS Lync 2010, and which include Presence Management, IM, and audio/video/webconferencing with MS Lync.
This service is compulsory and must be offered by the bidding MMSP.
· Conferencing Services is the integration of Lync-based Web conferencing (in which attendees use their computer audio and video capabilities to participate) with traditional audio and video bridging. This service is optional and may be offered by the bidding MMSP.
· Hybrid Messaging Architecture. Due to the wide array of network connectivity models among UNICEF 296 offices, some offices benefit from reliable and adequate network connections, and can therefore obtain messaging service from the cloud proposed by the MMSP. Some other offices do not benefit from such reliable and adequate network connections, and must therefore obtain messaging from locally-hosted MS Exchange and MS Lync servers.
In both cases, the MMSP will support with the same SLA UNICEF users as well as the messaging infrastructure, whether located in the cloud or on a UNICEF office premises.
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