Other justification
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TESTA-ng related services are currently provided through the DI/07820 FWC (DIGIT/A3/PN/2019/026), which expired on 17/06/2024 and allows specific contracts to be implemented until 17/12/2024. To ensure business continuity of these critical services, the Commission launched on 23 May 2019 the restricted procedure DIGIT/A3/PR/2019/10 with the aim to migrate to a new TESTA network. The Commission estimated at that time that this procedure should have been completed with the signature of the contract by May 2021, which would have allowed sufficient time for completing the full transition from TESTA-ng provider to the new TESTA provider (with a transition period lasting approximately 830 days) before the expiry of the TESTA-ng FWC. However, due to significant and unexpected delays in the procurement procedure, in April 2023 the Commission had to cancel the procurement procedure DIGIT/A3/PR/2019/10 for reasons explained further below. Due to the critical importance of the services provided and sensitive nature of the networks concerned, failing to find a sustainable solution ensuring business continuity for the provision of the TESTA-ng services beyond 18 December 2024 would have had severe operational impact and inflict considerable harm on the reputation of the Commission and the EU. To guarantee the uninterrupted delivery of these essential services, following the cancellation of the procurement procedure DIGIT/A3/PR/2019/10, the Commission launched a negotiated procedure without prior publication of a contract notice under Point 11.1(c) of Annex I to the Financial Regulation (2018). The Commission considered the conditions for the above procedure to be met, notably: 1) Unforeseeable event not being attributable to the contracting authority The need to preserve business continuity through a negotiated procedure was brought by a sequence of events outside the control of the Commission, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a significant delay in the preparatory activities and the various steps of the TESTA procurement procedure, and the three consecutive orders issued by the EU Courts preventing the signature of the TESTA FWC. These events, together with the Commission’s assessment concerning the implications of the substantial geopolitical, technological and macroeconomic changes since the publication of the procurement procedure in May 2019, led to the cancellation of the TESTA procurement procedure in April 2023 and to the resulting impossibility to migrate to a new network before the expiry of the current TESTA-ng FWC. With the launch of procedure DIGIT/A3/PR/2019/10 on 23 May 2019, the Commission acted promptly in order to secure a transition from TESTA-ng to TESTA without any foreseeable risk to business continuity. The Commission, however, could not predict the above events. 2) Impossibility to comply with the time limits set by the Financial Regulation for an (urgent) open/restricted procedure Following the cancellation of TESTA, the Commission immediately took preparatory steps aimed at launching procurement procedure(s) with the purpose of ensuring business continuity. With the last specific contract under TESTA-ng FWC expiring on 17/12/2024, however, compliance with the time limits set in the Financial Regulation for one or more (urgent) open/restricted procedure(s) was not possible. After in-depth assessment and analysis of various possible future directions, the Commission approved a new strategy replacing TESTA, the EU Interconnectivity and eXchange Platform (EU-IXP), representing a fundamental shift from the current TESTA model, moving from an outsourced to an insourced managed services delivery model. In this new model, the Commission will have to manage multiple contractors and providers covering the different service elements included in the scope of EU-IXP and will play the role of integrator and orchestrator among them. Given the fundamental shift and number of procurement procedures and services to be built, the design, launch and completion of the new competitive procedure(s) necessary for implementing the EU-IXP, combined with achieving the desired result (migration of the services to EU-IXP) was not feasible within the remaining time limits before December 2024. The necessity to keep the current TESTA-ng services running while the Commission develops the future EU-IXP services in parallel justified the conclusion that the only feasible option to bridge the gap between the end of the last specific contract under the TESTA-ng FWC and the end of the migration to EU-IXP was to continue using the services of the incumbent provider. Launching a new competitive procurement procedure (another restricted call for tenders) with the same (or gradually reduced) scope as the current TESTA-ng FWC to bridge the gap described above was not a feasible solution. Only the transition between the existing and a new network would have taken minimum 24 months, which itself is a period longer that the time between the cancellation of TESTA-RP call for tenders and the expiration of the last specific contracts under the TESTA-ng FWC. 3) Strictly necessary character of the procedure and resulting contract The contract resulting from the negotiated procedure will cover only the period necessary to implement EU-IXP strategy and migrate to the new environment (end of 2027). While it is expected that, after completing market consultations, design, test and procurement phases, the EU-IXP platform will be available in 2026, it is estimated that the timeframe to migrate all current TESTA customers will start beginning of 2026 and will last approximately 24 months (based on the number of customers’ sites to migrate), i.e. by end of 2027. As the new TESTA FWC opens the possibility to gradually migrate and substitute the different components of TESTA-ng to the components of the new EU-IXP platform, specific services of the TESTA-ng network will be discontinued following successful migration.