Decision Maker:

Outcome:

Is Key Decision?: No

Is Callable In?: Yes

Date of Decision: September 9, 2024

Purpose:

Content: Salford City Council - Record of Decision   I Councillor Jack Youd, Deputy City Mayor, Lead Member for Finance, Support Services and Regeneration, and chairman of the Procurement Board, in exercise of the powers contained within the Council Constitution do hereby approve:   the extension of the existing contract for Liquidlogic, move from an on premise hosted solution to a cloud hostedsolution, as detailed in the table below:   Detail required Answers Contract Reference Title/Description of Contracted Service/Supply/Project Extension of the existing contract for Liquidlogic, move from an on premise hosted solution to a cloud hostedsolution Name of Contractor SystemC Type of organisation (to be supplied by Corporate Procurement) Private Limited Company Status of Organisation (to be supplied by Corporate Procurement) Non-SME Value of Contract Extension (£) £608,751.40  full project Existing Contract Term 30/09/2019 to 29/09/2024 Extension Period 30/09/2024 to 29/09/2026 Contact Officer (Name & number) Jennifer Mcilquham – 0161 7932356 Lead Service Group Service Reform & Development Funding Source Revenue Budget Ethical Contractor (EC): Mayor’s Employment Charter EC: Committed to sign the Charter EC: Accredited Living Wage Employer   The reasons are:   Liquidlogic Extension & Move to Hosted Liquidlogic & ContrOCC have been live in Salford City Council since 2021 after a major implementation to move from the previous social care legacy system which started in 2020.   It is the core statutory Social Care, Early Help, Safeguarding and Financial case management system used by Children's Services, Adult Social Care Services, Adults Service, Public Health and Corporate Services. The system incorporates essential & statutory information on children, families and adults supporting essential service delivery.   There are portals which allows Salford residents and other professionals to refer in digitally and this starts the record within Liquidlogic giving us a full picture of involvement with individuals, from point of initial contact through the assessment and planning stages and then the link between Liquidlogic and ContrOCC actions payments to all our providers. Providers also have access to a provider portal where they can see what they have been paid and expected to be paid within the next payment run removing the need for paper remittances to be produced and sent out.[WP1]    Liquidlogic is also used by 9 of the 10 LA’s in the GM authority giving us ability to share knowledge and work closely with colleagues from other LA’s   Benefits of taking the 2-year extension: Liquidlogic is now embedded in the Children and Adults and Health Directorates and is continually being developed to better improve processes. Liquidlogic is also part of the Innovate Community Solutions project. Extending the terms will mean there is no impact on business areas and in turn benefit the residents of Salford we serve To further embed and improve the application to support the data administration, system usage, service levels and strategic planning and decision making To move from Liquidlogic would involve a lengthy and high-cost procurement process To move to another system would involve high capital expenditure to cover the implementation costs. Liquid Logic Implementation cost was £2,684,099   Benefits of moving to Liquidlogic Hosted Solution[WP2] [JM3] : All the risk of providing a leading-edge, highly resilient cloud platform with a secure, dedicated instance resides with SystemC. Improves our business continuity. In the event of a cyber compromise Liquid Logic would remain accessible as it would no longer reside on the SCC network. The traditional reliance on a highly skilled and experienced in-house IT workforce is removed (or significantly reduced) leaving them to focus on more strategic workstreams rather than the day-to-day technical operation of Liquidlogic. Supports SCC Digital Transformation ambitions by providing agile working and higher quality access for users and citizens who can access from anywhere using all standard browsers. SystemC offer high resilience availability – 24/7 x 365 days per year SystemC provide all the hardware, software and licences required to run the application suite to future proof against costly operating system and database upgrades. SystemC provide industry leading security around the application and our data, built on the UK based Microsoft Azure platform to leverage all the benefits of this multi-accredited provider with our own security processes and services wrapped around NCSC Cloud Security Principles Risk around regular hardware and software patching shifts to SystemC along with hardware maintenance and upgrades with virtually no impact on the user. Salford will benefit from tried and tested Disaster Recovery processes based in part on proven deployment processes, further reducing the requirement on Council infrastructure and thus saving money. All upgrades bring with them the latest security patches and protections regardless of when they are installed ensuring the platform attracts the highest levels of security and protection. SystemC elastic infrastructure has the scalability to reduce impacts of peaks or troughs in service demand, which could otherwise impact on user experience or business critical processes. The recommendation is to continue with Liquidlogic after the 2-year extension period as there is no desire from the business to move away from Liquidlogic after this period, but rather to expand the use where there is a clear benefit to do so, via additional modules such as EYES (Early Years Education System) which would replace an existing separate system used by the People Directorate giving us one single solution for Adults and Children.   As part of DDaT business continuity, the Cyber Security Strategy and the ongoing support of statutory and high-risk applications, DDaT are migrating systems, where possible, to cloud solutions to limit the impact on our services should Salford City Council ever be cyber compromised.   Moving this application to a hosted solution will allow DDaT to decommission servers in our data centre which currently host Liquidlogic. Removing these servers will not only reduce our costs it will also reduce our carbon footprint The saving on decommissioning servers in our data centre would be around £450,250.00.   Cost     Description   Costs 24/25   Costs 25/26     Annual Support and Maintenance     £169,315.96     £174,395.44   Implementation Costs (one of cost)     £72,260.00   n/a     Hosting costs     £132,390.00   £132,390.00   Total Cost for 24/25   £373,965.96     £306,785.44     Options considered and rejected were:   Liquidlogic Extension & Move to Hosted   Continue as it Continue with the current support and maintenance costs. The current annual cost is £144,384.43. This will increase each year based on the RPI rate which for 24/25 was 11.4%. The uplifted rate for 2024/25 is shown below.   The total cost per annum to remain as is would be:   Liquidlogic Support & Maintenance   £169,315.96 VM Ware licence £100,000.00 Estimate Server & Data Centre Costs £150,000.00 Estimate Data Storage £200,000.00 Estimate Total £619,315.96   2          Migrate the application to the SCC Cloud. We would continue with the current support and maintenance costs. The current annual cost is £144,384.43. This will increase each year based on the RPI rate which for 24/25 was 11.4%. The uplifted rate for 2024/25 is shown below.   To move to SCC’s cloud environment, we would need Consultancy support from SystemC to look at configuration changes around IP address etc. This would come at a cost of £1,300.00 Per day, we estimate we would need 5 days   Liquidlogic Support & Maintenance £169,315.96 LL Consultancy cost for Migration (one of cost) £6,500.00 Cloud Costs   £177,202.86 Total with one off costs £353,018.82 Total Per Annum £346,518.82   Assessment of risk: Liquidlogic is an essential tool, heavily embedded in SCC People Services. Moving the system to a hosted cloud-based solution will protect the system and impact on the service should Salford City Council ever be cyber compromised.   The source of funding is: The current annual support and maintenance contract for Liquidlogic is £144,384.43 and is funded by the DDaT People Budget, C1028. This is increasing by £24,931.53 to £169,315.96 per annum.   The Cloud Hosting costs are an additional £132,390.00 per annum.   Year one will also include a one-off implementation cost of £72,260.00.   The year one total increase is £229,581.53.   From year 2 the annual cost will be £306,785.44, this is an increase of £162,401.01 based on the current support and maintenance contract.   DDaT have actively identified costs savings across the whole DDaT function to progress this work[MC4] [JM5] [CM6]  to fund the additional cost. These include reduction in on premise data centre storage, oracle cloud licences and VMWare licences.   It is allowable within the contract extension rules to incur additional costs over and above the original contract value, as long as the additional cost is no more than 50% of the original contract value.   The additional cost for cloud hosting would be £337,040.00 which comprises of £72,260.00 one off implementation and 2 x hosting cost of £132,390.00.   Liquidlogic Costs     Description   Costs 24/25   Costs 25/26     Annual Support and Maintenance     £169,315.96     £174,395.44   Implementation Costs (one of cost)       £72,260.00   n/a     Hosting costs     £132,390.00   £132,390.00   Total Cost for 24/25   £373,965.96     £306,785.44     Legal advice obtained: Supplied by Tony Hatton   Financial advice obtained: Supplied by Joanne Garvin & Stephen Thynne   Procurement advice obtained: Supplied by Emma Heyes   HR advice obtained: N/A   Climate change implications obtained: Obtained by Michael Hemingway   Documents used: N/A Contact details Contact Officer:        Jenny Mcilquham Telephone number: 01617932356   The Lead Member has been consulted and is supportive of the proposed contract. The appropriate Scrutiny Committees to call-in the decision is the Health and Adults Scrutiny Panel and/or the Overview and Scrutiny Board.       Signed: Councillor Jack Youd Deputy City Mayor, Lead Member for Finance, Support Services and Regeneration Dated: 9 September 2024     *           This decision was published on 12th September 2024 *           This decision will come in force at 4.00 p.m. on 19th September 2024 unless it is called-in in accordance with the Decision Making Process Rules.   I think the payment runs are via Controcc not LL (LAS) - and I think this also extends to the external view for providers?? [WP1] Can I check if there are issues re NCA staff accessing via the Cloud? [WP2]  [JM3]@Walsh, Paul it wont have any affect on end users internal are external - we will simply change the URL’s but users wont see this ??  [MC4]Not sure what we are saying here? This is where we need to spell out - current costs and budget are £x….then going forward (leaving out one off implementation costs) the annual cost will be £x...therefore a difference of £x. Then are we saying that savings have been identified that fund the difference?  [JM5]@Cannon, Miranda have given more explanation and break down - does this make it clearer? yes [CM6]