For the second time in four years, the City of Montreal is forced to change its office suite for its employees. After moving to Google in 2019, officials will return to Microsoft in 2023.
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According to a document obtained by the Journal, the City estimates that it will cost no less than $50 million more over 10 years than if it had continued its previous contract with the firm Onix Networking Canada Inc.
This change is necessary in particular because of major irregularities in the call for tenders won in 2018 by the firm Onix to provide Google’s tools.
The City will therefore soon conclude a new contract without call for tenders of $28 million via the Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital, which reports to the Government of Quebec, for the acquisition of Office 365 for three years.
Irregularities in the call for tenders
The irregularities in Onix’s contract were uncovered last January by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which believed that the company’s bid should have been declared non-compliant.
“It appears that the same rigor and the same severity in the evaluation of a criterion have not been applied uniformly to all the bidders”, supported the report, which asked the Plante administration to terminate the contract of Onix as soon as possible.
During the transition to its new supplier, the City will also have to continue to pay for its Google licenses in addition to those of Microsoft for two years, which will generate additional costs.
According to the administration, however, this will allow the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) to work in the same computer environment as the other services.
The SPVM had not made the jump to Google in 2019, for security reasons.
“Since the pandemic, our world has changed and so have our digital needs. Our systems must be compatible with those of other institutions and levels of government, explains the press secretary of the mayoress Valérie Plante, Marikym Gaudreault. It’s the best business decision in the context.”
A “fiasco” says the opposition
“I am surprised and worried that the administration is happy to change a solution implemented not even three years ago and to incur unnecessary expenses. It’s a total fiasco”, plague Abdelhaq Sari, spokesperson for information technology for the official opposition.
The elected official recalls having warned the Plante administration in 2018 that a migration to Google was risky, in particular because of incompatibilities with the SPVM.
“We had already predicted that there would be a fiasco,” he said. We are talking about millions of dollars that taxpayers will have to pay. Fifty million is a sports center that we could have opened for our young people, but that we are going to throw in the trash.