Hampshire County Council is a multi-site complicated business with over 500 line of business systems and over 30,000 employees. It is comparable in scale to many multinationals. In addition we are very tightly bound to the European Union rules for public sector procurement.

The huge majority of our IT procurement is with term contracted suppliers under EU procurement rules. Consequently there is little value in cold calling any of our staff.

We prefer to deal with suppliers by appointment arranged through the appropriate manager. Our team is immensely busy and find it difficult to make time for cold sales calls, please do not mistake politeness for interest. We will not provide the names or contact details of individuals to sales staff unless we have a contractual relationship or are investigating a product.

If you have a new and unique opportunity or product please email to it.general.admin@hants.gov.uk and we will get an acknowledgement back to you promptly.

Please do not chase for follow up or further contact: if there is an interest in your product or proposition we will get in touch. That said we do over £20 million pounds worth of business annually with our suppliers and have successful and close working relationships which are mutually beneficial.

Suppliers who have products that may be of interest as line of business applications would wish to know the following information.

We currently provide our core staff with a Citrix desktop usually within one or two versions of the latest release. We host applications on

• Microsoft Server 2003 at present both physical and virtual currently using ESX
• Redhat Linux, some other versions are supported where necessary
• AIX although some applications remain on Sun Solaris.

All applications are presented through Citrix program Neighbourhood or through a browser. The following are our preferred database options

• MS SQL Server 2005
• Oracle 10.

We do not allow open supplier access to applications. The standard approach is a two factor authentication read only login or IP:Sec with a change control raised by the system owner on each occasion of access. In most cases we will make changes requested by suppliers to ensure a secure and supportable systems environment.