Telecom Italia exercised its right of first refusal to make a counter bid to create a cloud-based infrastructure for Italy’s public administration, an apparent effort to oust a rival consortium.

The government had already chosen web hosting provider Aruba and broadband operator Fastweb for the project, deeming their offer to be more competitive on economic terms. However, a consortium including Telecom Italia, Sogei, Leonardo and CDP Equity had 15 days to match the offer.

Telecom Italia confirmed its consortium has now made use of its pre‑emption right, “undertaking to fulfil the contractual obligations under the same conditions offered by the current provisional contractor”.

The winning consortium will be charged with building and managing a new National Strategic Hub (NSH), which was proposed by the country’s Department for Digital Transformation in 2021. The purpose of the NSH is to accelerate the digital transformation of public services and guarantee national data security and control.

The NSH is one of three pillars of Italy’s Cloud Strategy, alongside creating a qualification process for public cloud providers and their services, and the migration of public administration data and services to the cloud.