ECB - Provision of the Statistical Production and Compilation Environment (SPACE) — PRO-004816

Description

The European Central Bank (ECB) is seeking suitable candidates that will be invited to participate in the negotiated procedure for the provision of the statistical production and compilation environment (SPACE). The ECB collects and manages large amounts of heterogeneous data and statistics to support its institutional functions and tasks (monetary policy, supervisory functions, tasks of the Eurosystem,...). The current Statistical Data Production Environment (SDPE) will be decommissioned due to the end of life reached by some of its components and will be replaced by a new environment that will allow the ECB to fully implement its business strategy with regards to data and data centricity. The SPACE project will introduce this new system in 3 main packages: 1) System build; 2) Migration; 3) Maintenance and support. The European Central Bank (ECB) is seeking suitable candidates through this call for applications that will be invited to participate in the negotiated procedure and to submit a tender for the contract on the provision of the statistical production and compilation environment (SPACE) (the ‘Contract’). Data is a strategic and common asset of the European Central Bank (ECB). The ECB collects and manages large amounts of heterogeneous data and statistics to support the institution's monetary policy and supervisory functions, as well as other tasks of the Eurosystem and the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). The current ECB Statistical Data Production Environment (SDPE) receives on a regular basis (e.g. daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly frequency) time series observations about around 400 economic indicators. Today more than 20 000 000 time series are processed through a system based on a proprietary commercial time series-based product, comprising data storage, analytics and reporting components. With this software, the ECB statisticians and data scientists implemented the business logic for more than 120 business processes using the available scripting language (e.g. aggregations, frequency conversions, data validation and quality checks) over the last 25 years. In total, we identified more than 3 000 000 lines of this custom code and thousands of reports in different formats such as PDF, HTML or Office Open XML. The SDPE environment will be decommissioned due to the end of life reached by some of its components and the statistical production and compilation environment (SPACE) project will deliver a new environment that will enable the ECB to implement its business strategy with regards to data and data centricity. Integration with technologies like Cloudera Hadoop and Oracle Exadata, which are already in place, is to be expected. The SPACE project will introduce this new system in 3 main packages: 1) System Build (Dec 2019-Aug 2020): this new system is intended to support the ECB production of statistical data, initially focusing on, but not limited to, time series. Eventually, the new system is expected to be able to handle multiple ECB data types. Statistical production in the ECB follows the generic statistical business process model (GSBPM) and SPACE will directly support the following phases: build, collect (SDMX, CSV or Office Open XML formats), process (data validation, cleansing, aggregation, modelling, ...), analyse (data analysis and graphical visualisation), disseminate data and metadata management, governance tools and automation through workflow management will be made available. Development of a user interface (UI) to manage and monitor data processing on the platform. Enhancement of existing Python/R libraries for time-series. 2) Migration (Jun 2020-May 2022): Port over 120 existing processes supported by custom code (approximately 3 to 5 000 000 lines of code) to the new platform. SPACE intends to support: time-series programming languages, Python, R, Spark/Scala, Spark/Python or Spark/R. The migration to the new platform will be performed over a 2 years timeframe. The migration of the business logic and reports will need to be done in close collaboration with the business area data scientists owning the code and the new implementation will be owned by the business. 3) Maintenance and support (Jun 2022-Dec 2025): Provide 3rd level support services for the system (excluding support for the underlying Cloudera distribution and components). The services shall be provided in English.