The body overseeing procurement by the UK government has invited private-sector companies to bid on contracts for application and IT infrastructure hosting services for government agencies and released a framework contract for procuring such services from up to 12 vendors at once for a contract worth between £100m and £1bn.

The framework was designed to drive toward standardization, a document posted online read.

“This procurement is targeted at provision of the applications and services required to make available the Government’s large, mission-critical high-availability services that utilize complex infrastructure with server or mainframe based technology typically hosted in one or more traditional data center environments,” the document read.

The framework is for four-year agreements and covers departments of the central government, as well as bodies and agencies closely tied to them. Non-departmental public bodies, National Health Service bodies and local authorities can also use the framework.

Release of the hosting-contracting framework follows award of a £4bn contract to a group of 17 suppliers to provide IT hardware to the public sector. The 12-year agreement includes Academia, Akhter, Centerprise International Ltd, Computacenter, Dell, Ergo Computing, Fujitsu, HP, Insight Direct, Kelway International, Lenovo, Misco, Softcat, Specialist Computer Centre, Stone Computers, Viglen and XMA, Computer Weekly reported.

Hardware covered under this agreement includes desktops, laptops, tablets, servers, printers and peripherals.