Procurement of technology administration services for OCHA Digital Services Section, New York

OCHA’s Digital Services Section (DSS) was established in 2016 with one of its objectives to centralize several of OCHA purchases of “as-a-service” offerings, software, and digital technologies. Many of these offerings are charged on a monthly basis and can be small in nature (e.g. $10/month). Examples of these services are as follows and the full list will be attached to the formal tender documents:

• Pingdom – a website monitoring tool that monitors outside of the UN network, to ensure that all problems are detected.
• Sendgrid Used – to send highvolume transactional email for many of OCHA’s properties (ReliefWeb, Humanitarian Response, HID, HDX, etc).
• New Relic – a digital intelligence platform that lets developers, ops, and tech teams measure and monitor the performance of their applications and infrastructure. Used by almost all OCHA platforms/websites.

The overall objective of the outsourced administration (OA) of technological purchases is to achieve efficiencies in the administrative aspect of aforementioned services. At the moment, there are 26 separate services which OCHA is using that will be centralized.

The OA will aim to achieve the following objectives:

• Consolidation of payment responsibilities for OCHA’s online technological purchases within a single external provider;
• Ensure timely and effective payment of online technological purchases1 as requested by OCHA’s DSS.