20113023 - JEFO - Final - Redacted.pdf

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Justification for Exception to Fair Opportunity (JEFO) – FAR 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(B)

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Date: July 27, 2020 PR Number: 20113023

1. Agency and Contracting Activity.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Office of Acquisition (OA), Information Technology Contracting Division (ITCD), on behalf of the Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Enterprise Data Management and Engineering Directorate (EDMED), prepared this justification for an exception to fair opportunity.

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

CBP intends to award a firm-fixed price (FFP) delivery order without considering other awardees under the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) CIO-SP3 Indefinite-Delivery/Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) contract number HHSN316201200030W, pursuant to FAR 16.505(a)(4)(ii). The proposed contractor is International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), 6710 Rockledge Drive, Bethesda, MD 20817-1834.

3. A description of the supplies or services required to meet the agency’s need (including the estimated value).

The proposed requirement is to provide a continued Disaster Recovery (DR) capability for CBP’s Legacy Automated Commercial Environment (ACE). CBP has already established this capability as a cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution at the IBM data center to optimize data integrity and accessibility to ensure high quality performance, reliability, and system availability in support of the CBP mission to secure the nation’s borders while facilitating fair and legitimate trade. The existing solution provides a reliable, responsive, and cost effective method for the retirement of aging hardware, modernization of legacy infrastructure, and growing mission needs of the agency. The solution also provides the agility and flexibility to respond and support the evolving mission needs of the agency while managing risk, including the addition of a DR capability.

The IaaS solution must remain accredited and maintain a FedRAMP High compliant infrastructure and facility. The IaaS solution must continue to have connectivity to the CBP Data Center via a CBP-provided network circuit connection. The CBP DR environment is a Government furnished, isolated network within the IBM data center. DHS OneNet IP addressing is being used for the DR environment to ease server installation, configuration, and maintenance.

The maximum period of performance is for five years (60 months)

Base Year: September 29, 2020 - September 28, 2021 Option 1: September 29, 2021 - September 28, 2022 Option 2: September 29, 2022 - September 28, 2023 Option 3: September 29, 2023 - September 28, 2024 Option 4: September 29, 2024 - September 28, 2025

Total:

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4. Identify the exception to fair opportunity and supporting rationale, including a demonstration that the proposed contractor’s unique qualifications or the nature of the acquisition requires use of the exception cited.

This procurement is in accordance with 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.

The current CBP IBM environment and enterprise architecture was developed over a period of more than 10 years. After a significant ACE outage in August 2017, OIT devised an ACE Reliability plan to provide a reliable environment, prevent future data corruption, reduce potential for outages, provide flexibility to test restore procedures and provide enough capacity for the next two years while OIT migrates to the cloud. The outage backed up cargo across the country and all transportation modes. As a result, CBP contracted with IBM to establish a Disaster Recovery site to ensure CBP and the trade community would not face a similar outage in the future.

The ACE Disaster Recovery site and associated infrastructure was established in September 2017 in the IBM Federal Data Center near Raleigh, North Carolina. Since then, the CBP National Data Center (NDC) production infrastructure was re-configured to begin communication with the new IBM Federal Data Center hosting the ACE DR environment. Synching and configuring the two datacenter locations to be able replicate data, patch and maintain production, and the capability to switch roles between primary and backup, ensuring if NDC was impacted, the IBM FDC ACE DR infrastructure would be able to continue the primary production processing. To move the ACE DR to any other facility and/or use another vendors solution, would take us back to 2017 to start over. OIT senior management reviewed various options of moving the current ACE DR to another cloud provider and deemed that it would cost more than $2M to do so in labor alone, not including the funding needed to keep the current vendor site as is until the new build out would be available for production disaster recovery and a data transfer from one to the other could be done. Moreover, it took CBP and IBM FDC more than 18 months to get the capability we have today. Starting over would not be fiscally responsible to tax payers and place a high risk of another outage with additional congressional demands and loss revenue. In another outage, processing of cargo would be halted, losing millions of tariffs and fees collected daily. ACE is the trade processing system for the U.S. through which CBP and its Partner Government Agencies (PGAs) have implemented the Single Window for processing imports and exports. ACE serves as the system of record by which electronic trade transactions are conducted and recorded by CBP. The system provides a centralized access point for the trade community to connect with CBP and PGAs. ACE Collections is responsible for over $80 billion of income for the U.S. annually and enables flexible, scalable, and high-performing security and encryption for the nation.

Since October 2017, there have been numerous tariff modifications to enhance national security threatened by imports. In coordination with OT, OIT’s CSPD has implemented and continues to implement quick turnaround Section 201, 232 and 301 updates to provide enhanced capabilities in the ACE system. The White House, OT and CSPD work closely to implement the updates necessary to support the tariff modifications mandated by the President. Using an Agile framework, CSPD software development teams address the tariff changes, often outside of normal business hours to ensure changes are in place by the authorized date and time.

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Any other manufacturer’s solution would require complete re-engineering and testing of the systems.

The Government does not own the data rights to the data or software code and cannot reproduce the IBM products. IBM has sole proprietary rights and no other company has the data rights to sell, unless the company is an authorized distributor or reseller of IBM products.

Market research indicates that other companies’ similar products do not meet and cannot be modified to meet the Agency’s needs, due to the fact that products and maintenance from another manufacturer would not be compatible and cannot interface with the IBM proprietary hardware and software products currently in use by CBP. These IaaS products are only held and maintained by

IBM.

The use of anything other than an IBM brand mainframe product and associated software set has been deemed non-viable by OIT. Discussions with the vendor community and developers throughout OIT have revealed that the use of other products would be a multi-year effort to convert billions of rows of data and re-write millions of lines of application code and security profiles. Efforts to move to another product set would be a significant duplication of time and cost since the ACE application team is already researching and migrating code from Legacy ACE (LACE) to New ACE (NACE). LACE resides solely on the Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) platform which is propriety to IBM.

For the reasons described above, IBM is uniquely qualified to provide the required DR capability.

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

The Contracting Officer will determine the price fair and reasonable using one or all of the price analysis techniques detailed below, in accordance with FAR 15.404-1(b)(2), which include: (i) comparison of proposed prices to historical prices paid, whether by the Government or other than the Government, for the same or similar items; (ii) comparison with competitive published price lists; (iii) comparison with the Independent Government Cost Estimate (IGCE); (iv) and/or comparison with proposed prices obtained through market research for the same or similar items.

6. Any other facts supporting the justification.

At this time no commercial off-the shelf (COTS) unit is available to replace these particular hardware systems purchased and upgraded. They were custom built, tested and manipulated to meet the needs and use of CBP. No other means exist to remove the manufactuer’s proprietary rights to its IBM hardware and/or licensing. This infrastructure is critical to the CBP mission, specifically the trade community.

Further supporting a smooth transition and continuity of support, IBM has over 20 years of institutional knowledge of CBP functions and a pre-existing secure network connection from the CBP National Data Center (NDC) to the IBM facility that would house DRaaS. IBM maintains the CBP Mainframe as a Service (MFaaS) site at the same facility, which would allow ease of access for information transfer should the ACE DR system be needed.

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7. A statement of the 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.

Over the past few years, the ACE program has evolved to include LACE and NACE. The target architecture for NACE includes migration away from the AIX operating system, to a Linux based operating system, which would allow CBP to run the ACE application on hardware other than IBM pSeries. While the Application teams continue researching and migrating code, EDME must maintain current infrastructure for LACE on the existing pSeries devices. Projection is that over the next three years, backend CBP systems and applications will be modified so that the ACE DR system may be housed in other FedRAMP cloud based datacenter/providers moving forward.

8. CBP intends to post this requirement on Beta SAM pursuant to FAR 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D).

9. Technical/Requirements Personnel Certification.

10. Contracting Officer Certification.

JEFO Approvals: