Resellers have been urged to “get to work now” to prepare for a monster new public sector IT framework with a potential £20bn purse.
The tender process for Technology Products & Associated Services (TePAS) 3 is slated to open on 31 January 2027, according to a preliminary market engagement notice published on Tuesday.
It could then go live as soon as 1 July 2027 and run until 1 August 2031.
Its estimated £20bn, pre-VAT purse dwarfs that of predecessor framework TePAS 2, which went live in October 2023 and is set to run until October 2027.
But news of its imminent arrival may have gone under the radar, according to Chris Farthing, CEO of public sector framework and bid management outfit Advice Cloud.
“This is a major framework for resellers, especially given the uplift in numbers with all the infrastructure requirements around AI. It should be on all major resellers’ radars,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“They really need to be getting to work on this now,” he added.
Unlike its predecessors, TePAS 3 will be run by Government Commercial Agency (GCA), after it chomped up predecessor Crown Commercial Service earlier this year.
The GCA has already made a big noise around G-Cloud 15, which it characterised as the “most significant upgrade” to the cloudy framework in its 14-year history.
While G-Cloud is built around cloud software and services, TePAS is GCA’s route for technology hardware, packaged software and associated services.
TePAS 3 could be a leaner framework than its predecessor, with fewer Lots, Farthing speculated in his guide to the framework (see here).
While TePAS 3’s conditions of participation haven’t yet been published, TePAS 2 “set a high bar, asking for several ISO certifications on top of Cyber Essentials, along with financial standing checks, insurance and a carbon reduction plan”, Farthing noted.
“It’s sensible to plan for something similar,” he wrote.
“If you don’t hold those certifications today, getting them can take longer than the time left before the tender opens.”
