Sberbank cancelled purchase of VKS for half a billion rubles

2017: Canceling of the tender

Sberbank which at the end of June, 2017 postponed date of the choice of the supplier of a video conferencing for five months cancelled on July 7 the problem tender for this subject. It follows from the protocol of failure from carrying out the tender posted by bank on the website of state procurements. Requests from applicants after a number of adjustments of terms were accepted till January 30, 2017. The results of the tender were initially going to be summed up till June 30, however on June 28 this date was changed for November 1, and now and it completely lost relevance.^[1]

In the protocol of Sberbank the reason of canceling of tender specifies "need of making changes in the technical specifications and a technique of assessment" of requests. On a question of CNews that can change in these sections of the tender documentation, in the press service of Sberbank reported that it is going to perform optimization "for the purpose of decrease in total cost of ownership and improvement of quality of the required solution".

According to the edition, Spiritist proposed to the customer the solution Videomost, it was designated in the requests by Rostelecom and IT. TrueConf and Huawei obviously came to the tender with own solutions. With high probability Marvis offered Avaya, and Netvell — VKS of the Russian company Mind though the source of CNews and assumes that, perhaps, everything occurred on the contrary.

As one of market participants reported the edition, the tender documentation of Sberbank was registered under specific vendor — Mind. As one of examples it provided the mandatory requirement that the minimum set of external interfaces should include access to a certain SOAP protocol while SOAP API of server control of conferences is available only for solutions of Mind. Also according to market participant, authors of the tender documentation often used the terminology accepted only at this vendor, for example, referring to as virtual cells of negotiations by "rooms". Along with it the anonymous source of CNews recognized that in later versions of the tender documentation the customer made certain changes which, on the one hand, nominally allowed to apply for the contract to suppliers of other solutions, but with another — "did not change an overall picture".

2016: Announcement of purchase

Sberbank selects software provider for the organization of a system of a video conferencing (VKS). The corresponding competition with the starting price of agreements of 481 million rubles was announced on November 9, 2016^[2]. On February 7, 2017 participants of the tender became known.

TrueConf and Huawei dump in the tender of Sberbank at the choice of VKS

According to the protocol of a tender committee of the application for participation gave 7 companies: Rostelecom, TrueConf, IT, Spirit DSP, Netwell, Marvis and Huawei. The cost of services is in offers of 5 companies at the level of the starting price. On their background the requests "Huawei Technical Companies" and "TrueConf" are selected. The first suggests to execute the contract for 359.8 million rubles (-25%), the second for 259.5 million rubles (-46%).

All requests are transferred to the working group for consideration and assessment. Summing up is planned for June 30, 2017.

As it appears from documentation to purchase, within the project Sberbank is going to create the VIDEOCONFERENCING modern system providing a qualitative, scalable and convenient service. It should integrate in itself the existing VIDEOCONFERENCING system, the adjacent systems and give new opportunities of communications.

The contractor of the project will have to deliver to bank the non-exclusive licenses unlimited by the number of users, with the maximum quantity of ports up to 19,000 (or without restriction on the number of ports). In addition, tasks of the contractor include works on setup and system implementation of VKS and also service in post-warranty technical support.

The approximate plan of acquisition of the rights, works and services is provided in the table below.

The system created in bank should provide to users complex service for holding meetings, seminars, video conferences, webinars, joint work over projects and joint work with documents.

At the first stage in 2017 a system should cover requirements of bank for 4400 VKS ports. Further it has to be performed horizontal scalings of a system up to 19,000 simultaneous ports HD 720p@30. From them 13,720 ports are intended for connection of web and mobile clients, 5280 – for connection of H.323/SIP of devices.

A system should support the organization of sessions of a video conferencing with connection of participants under the SIP protocols (RFC 3261) and H.323 (ITU-T). At capture and transfer of video signal on them it is required to provide the maximum permission of capture and a broadcast of video signal Full HD (1920x1080 pixels) with a frequency not less than 30 frames per second.

In addition a system should support connections to an action of the participants using mobile or stationary phone, terminals of video conference of third-party producers and also equipment MCU Polycom RealPresence Collaboration Server RMX (2000, 4000). Besides, VKS should provide ability to integrate with software of Microsoft Lync 2010, Microsoft Lync 2013 and Skype for Business.

One of requirements to a system - the level of availability is not lower than 99.99% with the term of recovery of a separate node no more than 5 minutes.

As for scaling options, according to requirements of the customer, they are limited to value in 70,000 HD ports. Such indicator can be reached due to increase in number of servers in nodes of network of a video conferencing.

In the middle of February, 2016 Sberbank announced the tender^[3] on supply of equipment and licenses softwares of Avaya for a video conferencing. Then the bank allocated for the potential contractors only about three days on that they managed to send the requests to the organization. As a result the winner announced Komptek company, and the cost of purchase was $29.6 million.

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