Human Resources And Information Technology Committee Approves Network Managed Services Contract With Heartland Business Systems

The Human Resources and Information Technology Committee met 04/26/2023. One of the items they took up was a request from IT Director Corey Popp to award Network Managed Services to Heartland Business Systems. The committee approved the request by a vote of 3-0 with Alderperson Chris Croatt (District 14) abstaining.

I’ve prepared a transcription of the discussion for your downloading pleasure.

Director Popp had submitted a two-page memo to the committee which he reviewed during the meeting.

Back in March of 2022, Heartland Business Systems had been awarded a contract to perform a network assessment on the city’s IT network services and IT operation. As a result of that assessment, in the 2023 budget, the IT Department had been budgeted $37,500 for managed network services and $37,500 for managed data center services, for a total of $75,000.

At the end of 2022, Director Popp published Request For Proposals (RFPs) for Network Managed Services and for Data Center Managed Services. He received three proposals back, all of which greatly exceeded the $75,000 the department had been budgeted.

He reworked the RFPs and asked them to separate out one-time remediation for the issues in the network and data center from the recurring monthly costs to take over the managed services. He received two proposals back, both of which were still over-budget but not to the degree they had previously been.

Director Popp was now asking for approval to go forward with part of the proposals. He wanted to proceed with a one-time data center and network remediation which would cost $126,000. He also wanted to go forward with an annual network managed service agreement which would cost $41,267 but decline the annual data center managed service agreement which would have cost $53,200.

He wanted to decline the data center managed service agreement for two reasons:

1. It put the department over-budget on its recurring costs, and
2. The city had moved much faster with software-as-a-service opportunity that he thought they would. The city had moved to the Tyler ERP cloud-based system, the Police Department moved some of its resources to a cloud based system, and the Parks and Rec Department’s recreation software had been moved to the cloud. Additionally, there were a dozen other programs in the queue to move to the cloud. So, he did not think the managed data center portion of the proposal was necessary any more.

He did note that although the city would be taking care of the data center management in-house, Heartland Business Systems would be able to provide assistance on an as needed basis, and the IT Department did have a line item in its budget to cover consulting services which it could use to pay for that.

Director Popp reviewed how the services he wanted to move forward with would be paid for.

• Network Managed Services – the city had budgeted $75,000 total between network managed services and managed data center services. Although the network managed services would cost $41,267 which was more than the $37,500 that had been budgeted for it, the difference could be made up for by the remaining $37,500 that was no longer going to be spent on managed data center services.
• One-Time Remediation Costs – the estimated cost was $126,000. The city had allocated $90,000 from the 2020 Excess General Fund Balance. The IT Department had also been allocated 2021 Excess General Fund Balance dollars and could use some of that to make up the remaining $36,200 needed.

Alderperson Denise Fenton (District 12) asked if he could give a high-level overview of what the remediation would entail. Director Popp responded that it would include

• Upgrade and tuning of the virtual environment including reconfiguring and reallocating the disk space.
• Clean up the security policies to help speed up the network logins and make sure that they are all still relevant.
• Operating system and firmware updates to make sure that everything is current and they do not have any security flaws in any of the servers.
• Update the protocols/network functions that run on the servers.
• Assistance with stale account management and deprovisioning.
• Make sure the databases are running correctly and don’t need to be reindexed.
• Help with end-of-life notices on hardware and operating systems.

The committee voted 3-0 with one abstention to approve the request to award Network Managed Services to Heartland Business Systems.

View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1099692&GUID=01B33D0D-42D0-41BA-8A2F-5B5D7EC04290