NHS England has hired IDC for £46,000 to benchmark software licensing and pricing ahead of what appears to be renegotiation of its £774 million Microsoft licensing deal. The current agreement, signed in 2023 via reseller Bytes Software Services, covers email, Teams, and security tools for roughly 1.5 million NHS staff. The benchmarking contract runs April through August and is designed to assess whether NHS England is getting competitive pricing before entering what could be another nine-figure procurement. The relatively small spend is standard groundwork for large public sector contracts, where even minor pricing shifts can mean tens of millions of pounds over the contract lifetime.
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