How Circle IT won £15m contract for 'one of biggest WiFi deployments' in Europe

Founder Roger Harry reveals to CRN the 'arduous process' the MSP had to undertake to secure its massive win

Welsh MSP Circle IT is celebrating its first deal with local institute Cardiff University, which is valued at £15m over ten years.

The agreement will see the Cardiff-based Microsoft partner "radically overhaul" the university's network infrastructure and support services over the next decade.

The contract is comprised of a three-year rollout period followed by seven years of services support and the MSP claimed that it will be one of the largest WiFi network deployments in Europe to date. The deal will see Circle installing wired and wireless network access across the University's sprawling campus, encompassing 11,000 wireless access points and over 1,000 switches.

Though Circle and the university will work together to manage and monitor the infrastructure in order to ensure around-the-clock service, the MSP will handle patch management, software updates, environment monitoring outside of university hours.

We caught up with Circle founder Roger Harry to find out how the MSP won the £15m deal.

CRN: What initially attracted you to the bid?

Roger Harry: We've been doing network infrastructure projects in universities and colleges for quite some time, so they're very much on our radar. And obviously, we've been delivering projects for the likes of Capital City Colleges group and Dundee University, looking to bid for something that was on our doorstep was slightly more attractive to us, instead of all the air miles and train miles!

It was on the radar for about three years and we've been talking to them quite a bit in terms of what we've done in other organisations of a similar ilk.

We knew it was going to be right up our street; the challenge was how big would it be? And was it something that we could deliver? As we scaled over the years and we've grown the business rapidly if fitted right into the sweet spot of where we wanted to win and what geography as well.

How competitive was the bidding process and how did Circle IT clinch it?

They went through a competitive dialogue process; they can come out for a number of different rounds, and they can hone the solution based upon the responses they get in each round to shape the next round.

With our experience in universities, we were trying as much as we could to respond to each round and give them the view of what other universities have done and how well things have worked in other ones.

It was an arduous process - to say the least - over a number of years...it was more about them coming back with ideas and solutions that they wanted to see and then they chucked that into the bid and so the bid got bigger and bigger as more areas came into scope.

[For example], during the process, they added in-depth security analysis toolset that sits over the top of networks. That obviously added into the mix as well as the initial hardware and software that was part of the first couple rounds of bidding.

How many bidders were you up against?

We don't officially know. We think it was somewhere initially around 40 to 50 bidders and then they shortlisted it down to five bidders that went through to the competitive dialogue.

Do you know the profiles of the other bidders?

Officially, I don't know!

Who are the key vendors whose technology you will be integrating into this deployment?

We've got HPE Aruba from a wireless perspective, Dell from a wired one. SonicWall for firewall and Infoblox for an IP address management (IPAM) solution.

Circle IT will also be taking the university's old kit and donating it to local schools and charities, as well as creating new jobs locally as part of the project. Was this a requirement of the contract?

We introduced this to the university because it is a project that we run currently with our corporate clients. For example, UKTV is one of our large clients where we take all of their laptops, we wipe them and then we hand them out to local charities and schools.

We're basically further enhancing that programme [with Cardiff University]; we will be looking at how we can utilise the old kit that comes out in the next few years in charities and schools in South Wales. There's further life left in a lot of that kit - some of it might be end of life -so we want to try and reutilise as much of that as possible.

That's us very much us leading the charge with the university and we're already looking at another project with them which has nothing to do with this [contract]; it's around replacing all their printers - we're looking at that as part of the community benefits that we're looking to enhance by doing something jointly with someone who is on our doorstep.

Because of the size of the contract, we have to employ more people because we've got our ‘business as usual' and now we've got a massive contract on top of that. We'll employ more people to go and help deploy this and other networks; as part of the deployment, there is a large amount of professional services and a managed SOC. That will involve manning and putting that SOC in place for Cardiff University, so it will absolutely create more jobs in the principality.