Basic Information

Reference Number

00003851036

Issuing Organization

Insurance Corporation of BC

Solicitation Type

NOI - Notice of Intent (Informal)

Solicitation Number

NOI 3049

Title

Cloud Service Provider

Source ID

SCRIBE

Details

Location

British Columbia

Purchase Type

Not Stated

Dates

Publication

2023/12/21 01:00:00 PM EST

Closing Date

2024/01/12 03:00:00 PM EST

Contact Information

Strategic Sourcing

sourcing@icbc.com

Description

The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia intends to conduct a competitive procurement solicitation for a hyper-scale cloud service provider (CSP) in January 2024 by invitation only. The scope of the CSP procurement will be for Infrastructure as a Service and Platform service offerings.

The workloads ICBC plans to host in the CSP include but are not limited to:

Supporting migration of existing workloads from on-premises to cloud – this includes the Data and Analytics platforms, applications supporting ICBC core systems for insurance, claims and driver licensing and other ICBC specific, custom-built, applications.
Building new cloud native solutions, as well as extending current application capabilities.
Leveraging native cloud capabilities and services offered by the CSP.
Leveraging native cloud capabilities and services to support a 2nd Data Center location for Disaster Recovery purposes.

ICBC has defined a Cloud Strategy where existing on-premises workloads will move to the public hyperscale cloud service provider over the next 5-10 years. The impact of this journey on ICBC will be demanding as staff need to be trained on using the new cloud technologies, changes to existing solutions need to be assessed and addressed as they move to cloud and operational processes like observability and availability need to be re-engineered to work in unison with on-premises solutions in a hybrid landscape. The journey to cloud will also have to align to the principle of simplification from the ICBC IT Strategy, which aims to reduce complexity of all technologies.

Microsoft is a technology standard for several ICBC on-premises capabilities including productivity, identity and security, and operating systems. Some on-premises capabilities (e.g. identity and security) have been extended to the Azure cloud to support productivity tools like Microsoft Teams and enable secure sign-on for SaaS applications. These extensions were implemented in Azure due to the significant investment already made in the technologies, staff training and managing operational IT processes.

ICBC’s core business platform for insurance policy administration and claims management is the Guidewire suite of applications. For the past 10 years, ICBC has adopted and integrated the Guidewire products tightly into its operations. Guidewire has migrated its products to the Amazon Web Services cloud and now offers its application products only as a SaaS option. As ICBC is not planning to change core business systems, adherence to the Guidewire Roadmap means ICBC will have to also make investments in Amazon Web Services to use the cloud platform optimally. These investments will include creating infrastructure and platform resources in Amazon Web Services, so that ICBC can use some Guidewire features which are only made available through Amazon native capabilities. ICBC is in the process of migrating and upgrading its Guidewire claims management product to the Guidewire Cloud product and will be also taking this journey for the insurance product in the future.

ICBC has decided to select a CSP for infrastructure and platform services based on a closed competitive procurement between Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. This decision is guided by ICBC's strategic direction of reducing complexity, investments in people, skills, operations, and tooling to optimize the performance of ICBC’s use of Microsoft and future use of Guidewire Cloud as hosted on AWS. This anticipated arrangement will not be exclusive and ICBC may conduct future procurement solicitations for infrastructure-as-service and platform-as-service offerings.

ICBC intends to enter into a 5-year contract with the option to renew for 2 additional periods of 5 years each.

Disclaimer All amendments to the associated notice, including amended documents, plans and specifications (where applicable), are issued on bcbid.gov.bc.ca. MERX asks that you refer to bcbid.gov.bc.ca notice for these amendments. MERX stipulates that potential bidders may also be required to register with the buying authority as a bidder/plan taker. The contact information can be found within the notice abstract.