VMware Software Licensing and Support Renewal

City Power Johannesburg (SOC) Ltd is inviting bids for the renewal of its VMware software licensing and Software and Support (SnS) subscriptions. The municipal power utility operates a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) virtualised environment across two data centre sites: a production cluster at Reuven and disaster recovery clusters at Roodepoort. The environment runs on Dell VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure, comprising three clusters, 18 physical hosts, 992 physical CPU cores and approximately 856 TB of raw storage. The scope covers the supply of 992 VCF per-core licences, 29 vSAN Add-On licences for one DR cluster, Broadcom Enterprise Support for a three-year (36-month) licence term, and a licence true-up and management proposal to accommodate reasonable core-count growth. Hardware is excluded, as it has already been procured.

Successful bidders must demonstrate accredited Broadcom/VMware partner status and provide documentary proof of this, together with a partnership certificate. All licences must be genuine, new, and sourced directly through Broadcom's authorised distribution or reseller channels. Grey-market or second-hand licences will not be accepted, and City Power reserves the right to verify authenticity with Broadcom. Support must meet defined severity-based response times, including 30-minute response for Severity 1 incidents on a 24x7x365 basis, access to Broadcom technical engineers, patches and upgrades, a named technical account manager, and documented escalation procedures. Licence keys and entitlements must be delivered electronically within ten business days of contract signature, with an implementation and hand-over plan, a licence allocation and activation plan that avoids service disruption, and a consolidated entitlement report. Training and knowledge transfer for three personnel, documentation, and quality, health, safety and environmental compliance are also required.

Evaluation uses a 100-point technical functionality stage with an 80% minimum threshold, covering partnership certification, support and maintenance plans, at least five contactable reference letters for comparable VMware licensing projects of at least two years, and an incident management procedure. Qualifying bids are then scored 80 points on price and 20 points on specific goals (B-BBEE ownership, black youth and black women ownership, and local COJ supplier status). Only one bidder will be appointed. Bids close on 30 November 2026 at 11:00 and must be hand-delivered to the City Power Tender Advice Centre at 40 Heronmere Road, Reuven, Booysens; e-mailed or faxed submissions will not be accepted. Full bid documents are available from www.etenders.gov.za and www.citypower.co.za.