Want to be the IT Crowd for the BBC? An £800M contract beckons

Supplier will need to look after networks, email, tech support, tools and more – plus find cost savings
The BBC is looking for a supplier to provide IT for all its workforce and help automate parts of the corporation through a contract apparently named after a dog.

The UK's main public sector broadcaster published a tender for Project Petra, covering enterprise end-user IT and infrastructure for more than 30,000 workers in more than 200 locations worldwide on March 26 .

The contract will run from February 22, 2027, to October 1, 2032, with the option to extend for three further years, with a total estimated value of £793 million ($1 billion), including VAT.

Project Petra covers email, collaboration tools, support for users and their devices, as well as servers, networks, and application management, but the winning supplier stands to earn much of the contract's value through transformation work intended to cut costs.

The BBC is renegotiating its royal charter with the government, under which it collects a license fee from most households, which provides the majority of its funding, making this a particularly good time to be seen seeking efficiency savings .

"The successful supplier is expected to play a key role in projects to consolidate technology and to drive automation across the BBC, delivering long-term savings, and the estimated contract value reflects this potential scope," says the tender notice.

"The cost of delivering our day-to-day services is expected to be a small proportion of the total potential contract value."
The BBC plans to invite five or six suppliers to tender for Project Petra and will judge their bids 60 percent on cost and 40 percent on quality.

It plans to award the contract around February 8 next year.

The contract appears to be named after Blue Peter dog Petra, who appeared in the long-running BBC children's TV program from 1962 to 1977 and is remembered by a statue in the show's garden outside its studios in Salford, Greater Manchester.

Many decades later, the TV show's former editor, Biddy Baxter, revealed that Petra was actually the second Blue Peter dog because a puppy that appeared in one episode died two days later.

She and producer Edward Barnes drove around London in a Mini to find a replacement, eventually finding Petra in a Lewisham shop.

"Not a single viewer spotted the swap," she wrote in a book published in 2008 .

In 2015, Blue Peter used Project Petra as the name for a competition that selected three young viewers to tour MI5's Thames House headquarters with a TV crew, the first time a broadcaster had been allowed inside the building .

'BBC workers' set up Syncopatipad, SyncopatiCal, and SyncopatiPrint in the comedy show W1A:
"I wouldn't necessarily want anyone else to see this [printout]"
"Yeah no cool yeah.

We just set up Syncopati-Print.

OK done.

Cool."
"Yeah, no, cos er..

say again?"
"Which printer is it printing at?"
"Yeah no, it doesn't tell you that."
"No, like, it could literally be any printer, anywhere in the building."
In W1A , a three-series BBC comedy shown in the 2010s about the foibles of the corporation's fictional management, staff struggle to use a software suite called Syncopatico.

This fails to tell users which printer it will use for documents, swaps people's calendar events, and gets names wrong when generating live subtitling, all with hilarious results.

But even W1A's writers didn't think to name it after a Blue Peter dog.

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