Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) is increasingly focusing on cloud technology to improve the value of the services it offers to Canadians. Cloud services provide immediate solutions, scalability, business continuity and more predictable costs that enable ESDC to improve the programs and initiatives it is mandated to deliver.This procurement has the objective of enabling sufficient cloud capacity to support all of ESDC’s cloud requirements for the next 10+ years, including a significant portion of cloud usage expected as a result of the transformation of the Benefits Delivery Modernization (BDM)Programme, which encompasses the transformation of three of Canada’s largest statutory benefits programs — the Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security and Employment Insurance.Suppliers will be invited to pre-qualify in accordance with the terms and conditions of the ITQ (to follow shortly after this notice) in order to become “Qualified Respondents” for any later phases of the procurement process. Only Qualified Respondents will be permitted to bid on any subsequent solicitations issued as part of the procurement process.The intent of the ITQ is to qualify cloud service providers with the ability to deliver secure commercial cloud services capable of meeting the requirements for large-scale citizen facing programs such as those delivered by ESDC, who can demonstrate availability, scalability, elasticity and disaster recovery capabilities required to support such programmes.It is expected that the duration of the resulting contract(s) will be for an initial period of ten (10) years, with a number of additional option periods.
