Purpose

BACKGROUND
The incumbent CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) solution is provided by Symity, which supports LCC’s Customer Contact Centre. The agreement with Symity expires in August 2026.
The Symity solution includes the telephony infrastructure supplying the SIP lines (Session Initiation Protocol, transferring calls over a data network) and SBC services (Session Border Controller, sits between internal network and external SIP) that support the telephony infrastructure behind our current Microsoft Teams and Anywhere365 based solution. Symity’s sub-contractor for providing that telephony infrastructure is Gamma.
Separate to that, a procurement is in progress to acquire a strategic contract for a single telephony provider to consolidate the Council’s telephony and address the remaining PSTN requirements (due for national switch off commencing January
2027). The services provided by Gamma (via Symity) are within scope of that process, however it will not complete before the expiry of the incumbent Symity contract in August 2026.
RECOMMENDATION
The recommended course of action is to award a one year contract to Gamma to transfer ownership of existing lines to LCC.
The cost is expected to be:
Initial Implementation costs:
Project Management: £5,200.00
Engineering Solution Implementation: £3,750.00
Porting: £735.00
Annual rental costs: £136,500.00
Total Contract Value estimated to be £282,685.00 (+VAT)
The costs are fully contained within the existing IT service revenue budgets (specifically the A365 budget contained within the “Core Infrastructure Rationalisation and Core Platform Support” Executive Key Decision).
PROCUREMENT PROCESS
The contract is being awarded following a ‘Direct Award’ process under Government Commercial Agency’s (GCA - formally Crown Commercial Services) Network Services 3 Framework RM6116. While noted as ‘Direct Award’ under the framework, this is a compliant and competitive process where catalogue offers on the GCA eMarketplace are assessed against the Council’s requirements. This allows for a competitive process while maintaining an effort level proportional with the value and complexity of the requirement.
As such, this process meets the Council’s Procurement Procedure Rules (CPPR’s) and the applicable contracting regulations – which for this framework are the Public Contacting Regulations 2015.
CONTRACT AND COMMERCIALS
The contract charges are based on the Service Offer rate card, and costed as a combination of fixed cost (‘basket of goods’, e.g. line rental, onboarding) alongside a time and materials cost for professional services during implementation.
Performance is managed through the contract using the Supplier’s proposed Service Levels and Service Credit Regime within their service offering. Alongside this a key commercial
safeguard is the Council’s explicit right to terminate as a result of repeated service level failure, and to terminate for convenience on 90 days’ notice.

Decision

Do Nothing – the incumbent arrangement is on a contract for telephony, teams telephony and contact centre services, and is due to expire in August 2026. Doing nothing will lead to a loss of service to LCC Customer Contact Centre, and potentially failure to deliver statutory services.
Frameworks – Use of frameworks to procure the telephony service will trigger a similar issue with having to move all existing telephone numbers from the incumbent provider to a new provider and would require a competitive process that would not complete in the required timescale.
Tender – Use of the tender process to procure the telephony services will trigger a similar issue with having to move all existing telephone numbers from the incumbent provider to a new provider and would require a competitive process that would not complete in the required timescale.
Direct Award to Symity - Remaining with the incumbent will require a new contract for both telephony and contact centre solution services. Note that the charges for Gamma services are more expensive via Symity (£163k for 2025) than a direct contract, estimated to be £136k.

Alternative options considered

Option 1 -
Option 2 -
Option 3 -