04. case law: inter­pre­ta­tion of the spec­i­fi­ca­tions in the IT con­text, exclu­sion of a bid­der due to changes to the ten­der doc­u­ments

Exclu­sion of a bid due to changes or addi­tions to the ten­der doc­u­ments pur­suant to Sec­tion 57 para. 1 No. 4 ARC may also be jus­ti­fied if, accord­ing to the under­stand­ing of an infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy layper­son, a bid was sub­mit­ted which cor­re­sponds to the spec­i­fi­ca­tions. The deci­sive fac­tor for deter­min­ing whether an amend­ment or sup­ple­ment is present is the objec­tive recip­i­en­t’s hori­zon of a poten­tial bid­der from the addressed group of bid­ders of the respec­tive invi­ta­tion to ten­der.
The descrip­tion of the respec­tive intend­ed use can there­fore be inter­pret­ed in accor­dance with Sec­tions 133 and 157 of the Ger­man Civ­il Code to mean that prod­ucts must nec­es­sar­i­ly have cer­tain func­tion­al­i­ties, even if these are not explic­it­ly list­ed in the per­for­mance descrip­tion.
It is true that the per­for­mance descrip­tion must be as clear as pos­si­ble, § 121 para. 1 sen­tence 1 GWB. How­ev­er, this does not mean that the per­for­mance spec­i­fi­ca­tion must nec­es­sar­i­ly be designed in such a way that it con­tains only one pos­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tion, tak­ing into account all log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties. Even if a ser­vice descrip­tion is care­ful­ly pre­pared, it can­not be ruled out that minor ambi­gu­i­ties may occur. The lim­it to a lack of unam­bi­gu­i­ty is only exceed­ed if sev­er­al pos­si­ble inter­pre­ta­tions remain even after efforts at inter­pre­ta­tion by expert com­pa­nies.
If the cus­tomer spec­i­fies that servers are to be pro­cured for a high-per­for­mance het­ero­ge­neous com­put­ing clus­ter for AI appli­ca­tions, the spec­i­fi­ca­tions must be inter­pret­ed in this con­text.
Exclu­sion of a bid­der is there­fore jus­ti­fied if the bid­der offers ser­vices that do not fit the require­ments pro­file of the invi­ta­tion to ten­der. This also applies if, from the point of view of an IT lay­man, the offer cor­re­sponds to the spec­i­fi­ca­tions, since the objec­tive cri­te­ria of the spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the goods in them­selves are ful­filled. How­ev­er, if it is clear to an expert bid­der from the IT sec­tor that the goods are not suit­able for the assumed pur­pose from the out­set (in this case, due to the inabil­i­ty to arrange and inter­con­nect more than two GPUs), it can be exclud­ed with bids that do not meet the per­for­mance cri­te­ria.

Judg­ment: VK West­falen, deci­sion dat­ed 09.11.2022, VK 3 — 42 / 22