Central Bank awards IT contract to highest bidder

Central Bank Of Kenya building on Haile Selassie Road, Nairobi. [File, Standard]

The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has picked the highest bidder at Sh904 million for an IT service contract.

XRX Technologies Ltd, based in Westlands, Nairobi, clinched the lucrative deal after rivals Symphony Technologies Ltd and Trans Business Machines Ltd (TBM) were edged out on technicalities.

On March 28, CBK advertised a tender for the upgrade, installation and implementation of IBM power8 enterprise servers, a storage area network, director-class switching, disk back-up solution, associated software, accessories and cabling.

Symphony's bid price was Sh816,298,185, while TBM bid at Sh875,039,581 and XRX Technologies Ltd at Sh904,443,957.

On June 12, CBK wrote to Symphony and TBM informing them that they had failed in the first of the four-stage process.

The stages were Mandatory Evaluation, Technical Evaluation, Financial Evaluation and Recommendations.

“To progress through the evaluation, each bidder had to have successfully passed the previous stage(s). Your bidder failed at the mandatory stage and was therefore not considered at the financial evaluation stage,” read a letter by MH Tuya, assistant director of Procurement & Logistics, to the two firms.

Central Bank advertised the tender after requesting giant IT firm IBM to offer backup servers for its systems. But IBM said it did not officer the services required and recommended the three firms.