Report to: General Committee Report Date: May 10, 2010

SUBJECT: Award of Proposal 339-R-09 Wide Area Network (WAN) Connectivity and Internet Services

PREPARED BY: Sugun, Rao, Ext. 4868

Rosemarie, Patano, Ext. 2990

RECOMMENDATION:

1) THAT the report entitled “Award of Proposal 339-R-09 Wide Area Network (WAN) Connectivity and Internet Services” be received;

2) AND THAT the contract for Wide Area Network (WAN) Connectivity Services from Proposal 339-R-09 (PART A) be awarded to the highest ranked, lowest priced bidder, Atria Networks, in the amount of $1,407,835.80, ($1,392,076.80 for WAN Connectivity Services and $15,759.00 for network installation, inclusive of HST);

3) AND THAT a separate purchase order in the amount of $1,576.00 inclusive of HST be issued for contingency for the network installation;

4) AND THAT the contract for Wide Area Network (WAN) Connectivity Services from Proposal 339-R-09 (PART A) be funded from operating budget account# 400-404-5108 in amount of $1,392,076.80 over a five (5) year period subject to Council approval of future years’ budgets;

5) AND THAT the contract for WAN network installation be funded from capital budget account # 049-5350-10084-005 in amount of $17,335.00 (which includes a contingency of $1,576);

6) AND THAT the contract for Primary Internet Services from Proposal 339-R-09 (PART C-specific to 40 Mbps) be awarded to the highest ranked, lowest priced bidder, Atria Networks in the amount of $61,056.00 (inclusive of HST), over a five (5) year period ;

7) AND THAT the contract for Secondary Internet Services from Proposal 339-R-09 (PART C-specific to 20 Mbps) be awarded to the second highest ranked and third lowest priced bidder, Bell Canada in the amount of $90,301.64 (inclusive of HST) over a five (5) year period;

8) AND THAT the contract for Internet Services (for both 40 Mbps and 20 Mbps) from Proposal 339-R-09 (PART C) in the amount of $151,357.64 be funded from operating budget account# 400-404-5108 over a five (5) year period subject to Council approval of future years’ budgets;

9) AND THAT the monthly donation of $625 as included within their bid submission from the Atria Community Donation Program, be credited to the ITS donation account#400 404-9250. The budget for this account will be amended accordingly from 2011 to 2015.

10) AND THAT the Chief Information Office and Chief Administrative Officer be authorized to exercise the option to renew contract 339-R-09 for additional five (5) one (1) year terms at 2.25% per year discounted price for WAN connectivity services, and for the same cost as years 1 to 5 for internet services, subject to performance and budget approval;

11) AND THAT Atria Networks be designated as the preferred vendor for WAN connectivity needs for any future new or additional Town of Markham sites during the term of this contract;

AND THAT Staff be authorized and directed to do all things necessary to give effect to this resolution.

PURPOSE:

The purpose of this report is to obtain Council approval to award the contract 339-R-09.

BACKGROUND:

Markham’s existing Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting the Town’s thirty one (31) locations includes high speed network such as fiber, 20 Mega bits per second wireless and slower networks such as Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line, Digital Subscriber Line and T1 (copper telephone line). The type of connection was originally established based on the numbers of staff at each site and the corresponding data requirements, however, it hasn’t been enhanced along with the growing business needs and complexity of business applications over the years.

There is a strong business need to improve service levels, in particular at high traffic remote locations such as libraries, recreation centres and cultural venues. Users from remote sites are experiencing extremely slow network traffic, and there is an increasing demand from Town staff for reliable high speed data networks, in order to accommodate the growth in number of computer users, business applications and overall services. The current Wide Area Network infrastructure is not positioned to fulfill these requirements. In addition, the existing infrastructure lacks the capacity to support technology deployments that rely on high bandwidth connectivity such as Voice over IP that the Town will be implementing starting in 2011, video conferencing, unified communications that relies on Quality of Service technology, and overall enhanced connectivity for data transfer between the various sites.

The Town has been experiencing increased bandwidth requirements for internet connection in the recent past. This is expected to increase as more use of the internet becomes part of business operations. The existing contract with the current vendors for Internet Services comes to an end in January 2011. Both vendors provide 10 Mbps Internet bandwidth which are currently fully utilized.

It is with this background that the Town issued an RFP for the provision of enhanced Wide Area Network Connectivity for the existing thirty one (31) Town Sites and two (2) new sites which will be operational in 2010 and 2013, respectively, as well as for Internet Services.

BID INFORMATION:

Advertised, place and date	ETN
Bid closing date	January, 8 2010
Number picking up documents	21
Number responding to bid	6

Pricing for three parts was requested:

PART A – WAN connectivity services without facility rental.

PART B – WAN connectivity services with facility rental.

PART C – Internet Services with 20 Megs and 40 Megs options.

Note: Facility rental are fees to be paid by the Proponent to the Town for using Town facilities to provide services to the Proponent’s other customers.

For each specific PART, pricing was requested for five (5) years term with optional renewals for up to five (5) additional one (1) year periods with an expectation to see discounted monthly rates beyond the 5^th year.

Vendors were also encouraged to provide alternative solutions as long as they were meeting or exceeding all the technical requirements.

Proposed Evaluation:

The evaluation team was comprised of staff from the ITS department with purchasing staff acting as the facilitator. The evaluation was for both WAN and Internet Services and was based on pre-established evaluation criteria as detailed in the Request for Proposal: 60% Technical Requirements and 40% price, totaling 100% with resulting scores as follows:

PART A: Wide Area Network Services (WAN)

Wide Area Network Services (WAN):
Vendor	Score (out of 100)	Rank
Atria Networks	74	1
WaveForm Wireless Solution Inc.	61	2
Bell Canada	60	3
Terago Networks	50	4
Packet Tel Corp	41	5

Prices ranged from $1,407,836 to $2,894,177 (inclusive of HST), over a five (5) year period;

The pricing was evaluated on a per-site basis and average scores were calculated accordingly for the different bandwidth specifications (10, 20, 100, and 1000 Mega bits per second) for each proponent across the various sites.

OPTIONS / DISCUSSIONS - Wide Area Network Services:

The requirement for enhanced WAN connectivity as outlined in the RFP was for dedicated connection for all locations, along with specific minimum bandwidth requirement for each site.

The solution proposed by Atria includes dedicated, private leased fiber connectivity to all location with 1 Giga bits per second (Gbps) bandwidth that exceeds the specifications identified in the RFP for 20 locations (that are below 1 Gbps bandwidth as per the FRP requirement). Although the proposed bandwidth is higher for these locations, the price quoted by Atria is still less than those quoted by the other proponents for lesser bandwidth. Atria also proposed the following value added services as part of its solution:

• A monthly donation program of $625 ($7,500 per year) for 5 years – effectively off-setting the recurring monthly cost for 1 site. This is a tangible value added benefit which will provide cost avoidance on the ITS operating budget. 2011 ITS operating budget will be amended accordingly.
• Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Internet Protocol (IP)/Virtual Private Network (VPN) Solution capable of ensuring the highest level of availability at a given connection. This will be linked to a service level agreement with service rebates in the event of service failure.

Following the analysis of the proposed solutions against technical requirements and pricing, staff recommends a hybrid mode solution with four (4) primary sites (Civic Centre, 8100 Warden, Operations and Main St. Unionville Fire Station) on MPLS IP/VPN connection and the rest of 27 locations on the dedicated single link. Although there is a marginal additional cost associated with the deployment of MPLS/IPVPN solution at the four sites, the total cost of the Atria Networks solution is still lower than what is proposed by other proponents for the single link connectivity solution. However, the MPLS/IPVPN solution provides much greater load sharing, reliability and redundancy for the Town than the traditional single link connectivity. This additional capability will also help to divert and re-route traffic around link failures, mitigate network congestion and bottlenecks, as well as to set priorities for applications as required.

The recommended fiber WAN connectivity will provide the Architectural and Technical viability needed in order to meet the increasing demands of delivering services for the Town’s residents. Furthermore, it will enable the Town to access key business applications faster across the network, and will position us to easily adopt technologies such as Video Conferencing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for telecommunication, Enterprise Geographic Information System applications, Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), Software deployment across the network, supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Automated Vehicle Location (AVL).

Atria Networks has committed to service credits should there be any interruption of service which they’re responsible for by way of a formal Service Level Agreement in the proposal. The credited schedule is escalating based on the number of successive occurrences during the contract period.

In summary, the recommended solution will create a more robust network, where the overall connectivity between the various Town sites will be significantly improved. This pronounced improvement will provide immediate and impactful benefits for all sites, with benefit as much as 50 to 1000 fold capacity increase (depending on the location). It is worth noting that this service enhancement will be realized without impacting the existing operating budget for WAN.

PART B: WAN connectivity services with facility rental:

NO BID.

PART C: Internet Services:

The RFP requirement for internet service identifies 40 Mega bits per second (Mbps) and 20 Mbps for a five (5) and ten (10) years terms. The tables below show the results of the proposals evaluated.

Internet Services (40 Megs Bandwidth):
Vendor	Score (out of 100)	Rank
Atria Networks	77	1
Bell Canada	55	2
Connex See Services	49	3
Terago	43	4
Packet Tel Corp	41	5

Prices ranged from $61,056 to $205,942 (inclusive of HST), over a five (5) year period;

Internet Services (20 Megs Bandwidth):
Vendor	Score (out of 100)	Rank
Atria Networks	77	1
Bell Canada	51	2
Terago	43	3
Connex See Services	43	3
Packet Tel Corp	35	4

Prices ranged from $36,634 to $128,218 (inclusive of HST), over a five (5) year period;

OPTIONS / DISCUSSIONS - Internet Services:

The Town’s demand for Internet access has been steadily increasing over the past few years. A number of departments have mission critical systems offered through Application Service Providers (ASP), third-party entities that cost-effectively manage and distribute software-based services and solutions over the Internet. ASP used at the Town include: Payroll/HR system, HR recruitment, Ticketing system for Markham Theatre and Teraview for title search used by Legal Department. These departments would not be able to use these applications if the Internet service was not available or interrupted.

In addition, the Town has also committed to providing online (internet) services for residents and visitors, for example, eConnect for online Recreation program registrations, and audio-streaming of all committee meetings to the public, and free wireless public internet access in selected Town facilities which will be extended to other Town sites. Furthermore, the addition of traffic from public computers in the libraries will also generate significant demand for additional internet bandwidth in the near future.

In order to meet these business requirements, ITS recommends that we secure one service contract with 40 Mbps as the primary service, and another service with 20 Mbps as secondary link. This configuration will allow us to load-balance the traffic and also provide a fail over in case one link is interrupted. It is also recommended that multiple Internet service links be provided from two different service providers.

Therefore, ITS recommends that two Internet service contracts be awarded. One contract to Atria as primary providing 40 Mbps of bandwidth, and one contract to Bell Canada as secondary link with 20 Mbps of bandwidth - the two highest ranked bidders for the proposal. This will meet the current and future demands for additional bandwidth, redundancy and high availability, while the cost is contained within the existing ITS operating budget.

Multiple service links will allow Internet access for priority services to be separated in order to guarantee that sufficient bandwidth will be available for these services. Services can be prioritized based on how critical they are to Town staff/residents, and those requiring lower priority accesses can be routed separately from the mission critical ones; hence resolving the Internet congestion problem that is occasionally reported by users.

Another benefit for using multiple links is the ability to implement IT best practices of having fault-tolerant redundancy. Redundancy will ensure that Internet access is available at all times. If one link fails, the services associated with the failed link are switched to the other link, ensuring service continues uninterrupted. Redundancy is strengthened if the service can be provided by two different media and service providers. Coincidentally, our two lowest bidders for the tender proposed two different technologies, wireless shortwave and wired data-line respectively, to provide Internet service to the Town. This is an opportunity for the Town to implement full redundancy for Internet service links.

In short, multiple Internet service paths through different media will address the critical and multiple needs for reliability, separation of critical and non-critical Internet traffic loads, load distribution, redundancy and high availability. These service requirements will become even more crucial once the Town’s new portal is fully implemented.

FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS AND TEMPLATE:

HUMAN RESOURCES CONSIDERATIONS

Not Applicable

ALIGNMENT WITH STRATEGIC PRIORITIES:

Not Applicable

BUSINESS UNITS CONSULTED AND AFFECTED:

RECOMMENDED BY: