Request for Proposal for Hosting Services

The City of Cleveland's Department of Public Utilities (DPU) has issued Request for Proposal #2023-RFP-058 for comprehensive hosting services for its Oracle Customer Care & Billing (CC&B) system, targeting Information Technology firms capable of providing end-to-end hosting infrastructure and management. The procurement seeks a vendor to host and support the current CC&B version 2.7 system, which manages billing for approximately 430,000 customer accounts across 72 communities, including water, solid waste, wastewater, and electric services. The contract will be for one year with four potential one-year renewal options, with a non-mandatory pre-proposal conference scheduled for February 15, 2024, at 10:00 am and proposal submissions due February 29, 2024, at 12:00 pm. Key deliverables include infrastructure management, database administration, operating system maintenance, security, disaster recovery, and ongoing support, with strict service level agreements requiring 99.99% production application availability. The current system operates across eight total instances, including production, disaster recovery, test, development, and training environments, hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), with an expectation that the selected vendor will maintain and potentially expand this technological ecosystem.

While no specific set-aside designations for disadvantaged enterprises were explicitly mentioned in the documentation, the procurement appears open to qualified Information Technology firms with robust hosting capabilities. The incumbent hosting provider is currently Utilities Solution Partners LLC, utilizing Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database 19.18, and WebLogic with 16TB of data storage across multiple environments. The existing infrastructure includes six CC&B instances spread across four servers with high availability using Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) and an active-passive disaster recovery setup. Although precise budget ranges were not specified, the Fee Proposal appendix suggests scalable pricing tiers accommodating potential future growth from the current 710,000 end customer accounts to potentially 1,570,000 accounts. The City of Cleveland has established comprehensive insurance requirements for potential vendors, including $2 million in general liability and $5 million in professional liability coverage, indicating a rigorous qualification process for potential hosting service providers.