Tatarstan orders ‘national teleconference service’: 1,200 people at once, two languages

As Realnoe Vremya found out, the Tatarstan Digital Transformation Centre allocated 9.7 million rubles to get access to a teleconference service and its technical maintenance. The interface must be in Russian and Tatar and up to 1,200 people can use it at the same time. Read more in Realnoe Vremya’s report.

10 million to get access and technical maintenance

Most of the sum — 8.8 million rubles — will be spent for the platform’s equipment. The contractor is obliged to provide it for a year from the moment of receiving access, however, not earlier than 1 September 2023. Moreover, the contractor must respond to different failures of the system 24/7. The platform is planned to be monitored on business days from 8.00 to 17.00.

As for requirements for the service itself, the interface must have two languages — Russian and Tatar. Its users will be able to choose the best option. Also, 1,200 users can connect to different conferences on the platform.

There are going to be three key types of users there:

• a member — a user with the right to connecting to a conference with access provided to it;
• a moderator — a user with the rights to record conferences, store the archive, create conferences, access to the archive of his or her organisation’s archive of meetings and so on;
• an admin — an employee of the contractor with unlimited access, provides technical maintenance, monitors and sets the service.

Also, there are several mandatory requirements:

• Software when providing access to the teleconference service must be added to the united registry of Russian programmes or the registry of members of the Eurasian Economic Union.
• The teleconference service must be created in an operating system authorised by the Federal Service for Technology and Export Control of Russia with open source.
• The platform responsible for providing the teleconference service must be connected to the Tatarstan State Integrated Telecom System through a connection that will enable connecting 1,200 people at once “ensuring fault tolerance.”

Analogous contract terminated earlier this year

The Tatarstan Digital Transformation Centre planned to allocate money for the access to the teleconference service in December 2022. It was assumed the technical maintenance would be provided for three months, while the starting price of the contract was 2,25 million rubles.

The contractor was already confirmed. However, weeks after the signing of the contract, the supplier filed a complaint about the contractor. In January 2023, it was recognised as partly justified, while the Tatarstan Digital Transformation Centre violated requirements of one of the articles of the federal law. The centre was issued a warning to eliminate violations and the choice of the contractor was cancelled.

The case is that according to the organisation, the contractor deliberately circumvented the ban on the purchase of foreign software by indicating a wrong code. Instead of the code complying with “services in providing licences to the right to use computer software,” the Tatarstan Digital Transformation Centre indicated “services of technical maintenance of information technologies.”

Also, according to the contractor’s argument, the contractor indicated characteristics of the service in the terms of reference where only one specific platform meets the criteria, which entails a limited number of auction participants. In the end, the Tatarstan commission of the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service ruled only the first argument of the applicant reasonable.