05-06-2024 Y80764X SAS BNJ_Redacted.pdf

Version 3.0

JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

FOR AN ORDER EXCEEDING THE SIMPLIFIED ACQUISITION THRESHOLD

(AUTHORITY: FAR 16.505(b)(2)(i))

PO#23F0216

1. Agency and contracting activity. . National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Acquisition and Cooperative Support (DACS), and Office of the Chief Information Officer.

2. Nature and/or description of the action being approved.

SAS software—to meet NSF’s needs. SAS supports the Business Analytics/Data Warehouse (DWH) Enterprise Reporting System. The DHW consists of more than 1,000 daily complex extract, transform and load queries to support NSF’s staff analytical needs.

3. Description of the supplies or services required to meet the agency’s needs (including the estimated value).

SAS software allows for the querying of core NSF business information systems to provide up-to-date analytics on a variety of NSF issues. SAS assists in putting data from NSF systems like Awards, eJacket, iTRAK, and MyNSF into an analytically useful XML format. Additionally, the Budget, Finance, and Award Management (BFA) office utilizes SAS to support its enterprise information system and the Budget Internet Information System as well as outward facing Research.gov. .

4. Authority and supporting rationale. The contracting officer has determined the circumstances of the acquisition meet the following statutory exception under FAR 16.505(b)(2)(i) as supported below:

Only one awardee is capable - FAR 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B) – Only one awardee is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services ordered are unique or highly specialized. NSF’s Division of Information Systems (DIS) has utilized SAS software to support its ETL (Extract/Translate/Load) function required by data analytics applications since at least fiscal year 2014. SAS has been used even longer for statistical analysis at NSF. Over that period, NSF has invested approximately $1.3M in SAS software and changing the brand of this software would significantly duplicate many of those costs. Further, competing products were evaluated in 2014 and the top competitor was informatica, however, it could cause interoperability problems as current IT architecture is built with system components dependent on other components. One of those components that other systems depend on, namely the Data Warehouse, is SAS software. Changing from SAS to another brand significantly raises the risk of compatibility issues with layered Data Analysis Systems. Market research has shown that similar products cannot be modified to meet NSF’s requirement without incurring significant interoperability risks.

5. Determination by the contracting officer that the anticipated cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable.

Contract #47QTCA18D0081

The contracting officer determines that the anticipated price(s) will be fair and reasonable based on market research and a list of authorized resellers. In addition, the contracting officer will request additional discounts/price reductions before award consistent with FAR 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B).

6. Any other facts supporting the justification.

All supporting facts have been documented herein.

7. Actions, if any, the agency may take to remove or overcome any barriers that led to the exception to fair opportunity before any subsequent acquisition for the supplies or services is made.

To support the growing needs of the NSF user community and DIS Cloud migration strategy, the EDAS team evaluated multiple products to accommodate NSFs needs for data processing, ETL, Tableau integration, Data Security, Cloud support, and Data science capabilities and chose Alteryx. All our ETL jobs are currently being migrated to Alteryx from SAS and once they all have been migrated; over 1200 jobs, we will be moving from SAS.

8. Technical/Requirements Representative Certification.

I certify this requirement constitutes the Government’s minimum needs and the supporting data provided herein is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

DaTarsha Roy, IT Project Manager

9. Approving Official Determination of Circumstance Applicability.

In accordance with FAR 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(B)(10), the undersigned approving official for this justification hereby determines the circumstance cited above at #4, Authority and supporting rationale, applies to this order.

Contracting Officer’s Certification and Approval

I certify this justification is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Approve

Kristina Price Date Contracting Officer

May 6, 2024 Date