Procurement guidance

The United Kingdom’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) has published a document intended to help contracting authorities develop tender documents that comply with EU rules on non-discrimination in public procurement.

The publication follows similar documents already issued by the French, Italian, Swedish, German, Belgian, Japanese and US governments.

Due to a “number of recent EU infraction cases”, the OGC document stipulates specific rules for the tendering of computer hardware.

These rules demand that the “requirements for microprocessors must exclude any reference to brands (e.g., Intel, AMD), manufacturer-specific processor architectures, trademarks, technology-types or other potentially discriminatory descriptors.”

Additionally, specifications must “exclude any reference to minimum processor clock-speeds” as well as a minimum Front Side Bus speed or minimum cache memory size as “such specifications do not directly relate to performance.”

Instead, the OCG requires procurement decisions to be based on a “minimum score on an independent benchmark test measuring microprocessor performance.”