Call: Supply of standard Software, standard Maintenance and related standard services (framework agreements) – Software Acquisition Channel (SAC)

Buyer: European Patent Organisation, Munich

Deadline for receipt of tenders: 01.12.2025 12:00

Scope and reuirements

Introduction

The Framework Agreement is intended to be used as a vehicle for the acquisition and renewal through resellers of software products, licences and standard services related to these products and licences. Thereby, the EPO wishes to consolidate its inventory of current and future COTS software and related commodity support. This to streamline license management and simplify maintenance. The Contractor can be asked to play an active role in this optimisation. As standard services (e.g. services provided by the SP) are considered:  Training (on initial use of the software application, also on-line)  Initial installation (if needed)  Configuration support (to setup a working instance of the application)  Maintenance

The scope of the Framework Agreement includes:

– The purchase of the right to use software via a license or subscription

– The upgrade of existing software licences/subscriptions

– The renewal of existing software licences/subscriptions

– Standard support and maintenance for new COTS products

– Standard support and maintenance for COTS products in the EPO’s existing software landscape (Appendix 2)

– Other standard services

The scope includes products that fall into the one of the software categories listed in below:  Networking  Operating Systém  Application-Server and middleware  Security and Protection  Data management and Query  CI/CD automation  Development Environment  General workplace tools  Business function specific

These categories are indicated by the EPO for internal purposes when ordering software.

Software not in scope of the SAC: The SAC will not be used for the acquisition of certain software products, licences and subscriptions from a limited list of major providers. These are:

o SAP o Microsoft including the Azure Cloud platform Google o Amazon Web Services o Service Now o IBM (reducing in scope and value with each renewal) o DELL (limited to a single back-up and recovery solution)

 These are typically large contracts with specialist providers with whom we need to negotiate particular Terms & Conditions.

Current state:

Introduction: Since 2021 the EPO has managed 170 separate commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software contracts. The EPO strategy is to use cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) wherever this makes sense. As a result, client-server software, running on workstations and with a server component in the EPO data centre is increasingly the exception.

Platforms: The EPO software landscape comprises a mix of COTS and custom-built applications (roughly split 50-50, due to the specific business the EPO is in). These applications are hosted on SaaS, on (virtualised) Linux and Windows servers and Kubernetes. Windows is the most prevalent platform for running for COTS applications. EPO runs applications in its own data centrer and on several public cloud platforms, including managed environments on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS.

End user workspace: Approximately 9.000 PC clients and 4.500 iOS devices are supported in the EPO network. Users are provided with a standard, managed, “image” based on the Microsoft Windows + Office 365 stack including the MS Office suite, COTS products, and the clients of software developed in-house. Additional software packages are centrally deployed to “flagged” machines according to membership of active directory groups. The EPO has an IT Service Desk in place to provide first-level support via telephone or chat to users with functional, technical and access rights issues.

COTS Software Landscape:  The software described in Appendix 2 lists COTS software products currently in use which comprises the EPO COTS landscape. Please note that this can only be used as an indication of COTS software in use at a certain point in time while the EPO reserves the right to change the application list.