The bidders in Petrobras’ public cloud interconnection tender

Five companies submitted bids in a tender launched by Petrobras for the interconnection of its data workloads with the public cloud locations of AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The tender was divided into several lots and all proposals are currently under analysis by Petrobras. The bids were opened earlier this month.

For the first lot, 12 companies signed up to participate, with four submitting bids. They were Equinix, Cirion, Telefônica Brasil and Claro.

This lot involves interconnection services between Petrobras' datacenter and the locations of AWS and Azure public clouds in Rio de Janeiro.

Cirion offered the lowest bid at 1.22 million reais (US$216,000). Equinix, made the highest at 2.59mn reais. Claro and Telefônica offered 2.29mn reais and 1.60mn reais, respectively.

For the second lot, five of 12 companies that signed up made offers. These were Equinix, Cirion, Telefônica Brasil, Claro and Internexa Brasil. 

The second lot consists of interconnection services between Petrobras' data set-up at Equinix's SP3 datacenter and the AWS and Azure public cloud locations in São Paulo.

Equinix offered 321,322 reais, which was followed by Telefônica (558,928 reais), Claro (794,744 reais), Cirion (800,280 reais) and Internexa (875,556 reais).

Equinix, Cirion, Telefônica Brasil and Claro were again the bidders in the so-called virtual lot. 

This lot was created for Petrobras as an alternative to integrate the proposals from the first two lots, if the bidders so desired.

Cirion offered 1.67mn reais, the lowest bid. Claro, Equinix and Telefônica offered 3.0mn reais, 2.91mn reais and 2.16mn reais, respectively.

The same tender also included three other lots related to IT support for the public cloud works. Equinix, Claro, Cirion, Telefônica and Internexa presented bids for these lots.

CHALLENGE

Claro filed a request to challenge the bidding process, citing tax issues related to the services required.

According to the telco, the state tax ICMS (tax on circulation of goods and services) is mandatory for communications services and should be levied on some of the main items in the bidding process.

However, the company claimed that “some bidders, when preparing their commercial proposal, illegally presented prices taxed with ISS (tax on services), the rate of which is lower and allows the presentation of lower-value proposals" compared with those that "legally" took ICMS as the basis.

After an internal analysis, Claro's request was rejected by Petrobras' bidding committee, which confirmed the preliminary results of the tender.