20119258 - JEFO - 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: November 5, 2020 PR Number: 20119258

1. Agency and Contracting Activity.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Office of Acquisition, Information Technology Contracting Division, 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.

The proposed requirement is to continue with the provided cloud offering at the IBM cloud facility, inclusive of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), herein referred to as Mainframe as a Service (MFaaS). This requirement is a follow-on to task order 70B04C18F00001253, which expires on January 31, 2021. This provides an interim solution to continue supporting mission critical applications, mainly collections, residing on the mainframe platform, while the application owner, Cargo Systems Program Directorate (CSPD), completes application modernization to eventually migrate to a distributed platform. The solution also allowed OIT to migrate off of existing hardware and software in the National Data Center (NDC) that is pending closure, and into a commercial cloud service model, as required by OMB and DHS. IBM will continue to provide all mainframe hardware, software and associated support up to and including the z/OS operating system.

The maximum period of performance is for 1 year (February 1, 2021 – January 31, 2022)

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. Only the IBM solution is acceptable because the products required are unique or highly specialized and are items peculiar to one manufacturer. This requirement supports specific OIT hardware and software products proprietary to IBM, which are currently installed and in use to support mission critical

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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.

CBP’s current mainframe infrastructure is operating in IBM’s proprietary hardware and software that cannot be reasonably migrated to another platform or vendor without a multi-year effort.

The current products directly support mission critical applications, specifically collections.

Efforts are underway to refactor the collections application and then transition to a distributed platform but the refactoring efforts and migration are several yeas from completion. 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 mainframe product set would be a duplication of time and cost since the migration to a different platform using distributed systems is already underway.

Further supporting a smooth transition and continuity of support, IBM has over 20 years of institutional knowledge of CBP functions which made migrating NDC Mainframe to the Research Triangle Park Facility seamless. IBM maintains the CBP Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) Disaster Recovery site at the same facility which would allow ease of access for information transfer should the ACE DR system be needed.

Market research results indicate that IBM is the only cloud provider offering a complete MFaaS solution set to customers. In order to prevent an interruption in service and complete loss of production and backup data, only IBM products are compatible for the operation of existing components in the CBP environment. Compatibility with the existing production environment devices is limited to the brand name identified. Any use of other than IBM certified products would result in interoperability, compatibility and interface issues within mission critical CBP and DHS systems for data transfer. The IBM product set includes third party products to ensure complete functionality. These companies have successfully entered into a relationship with IBM, allowing IBM to create a product set yielding significant savings to the Government. The brand name IBM solution offers lower pricing due to volume discounts created through the totality of contracts/solutions IBM provides across the public and private sector.

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.

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This effort supports the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) 2010 Cloud First policy to reform federal Information and Technology (IT) management by mandating agencies to evaluate cloud based IT solutions before making any new IT investments.

OIT has determined migration off of the mainframe platform to a distributed platform is in the best interest of the Agency. Over the past decade, CBP has been migrating its applications and data to target commodity based hardware and data appliance solution environments – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft SQL, etc. While CBP has made significant progress in migrating legacy mainframe application data to target environments, the migration process is complex. At this time, the migration process is ongoing for the Collections application, which is a mission critical application.

Without this mission critical platform, required upgrades, patches and fixes, the data maintained through the mainframe computer would not be accessible to front-line CBP Officers and Border Patrol Agents. CBP and DHS would also encounter unplanned outages which would impact mission critical processing of passengers and cargo, thus jeopardizing the nation’s security. The CBP Officers and Border Patrol Agents rely on these systems to verify passenger and import and export cargo information. Failure to conduct passenger and cargo checks can result in terrorists or hazardous cargo entering the country.

CBP’s mission critical Passenger and Cargo systems modernization efforts are dependent on the continuation of this brand name solution and its residing data until modernization is complete.

Data must continuously be synchronized between the legacy environments, utilizing the existing software and the new modernized environments, until 100% of the functionality contained within the legacy environments is built into the new modernized systems.

Key applications within Passenger processing are primary/secondary inspections and Advanced Passenger Information system for anti-terrorist vetting of passengers and flight crews. Key Cargo applications that are still dependent on the legacy mainframe applications, until 100% of mission critical functionality is migrated into new modernized systems, include the secure vetting of imported and exported cargo and the processing of collected tariffs and fees for all cargo being imported to or exported from the United States.

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.

The Government intends to use the period covered by the proposed task order to continue the refactoring and transition off of the mainframe platform to a distributed platform.

On July 27, 2020, after two years of in-depth analysis and coordination, CBP received notification the Technology Modernization (TMF) was

- CBP intends to utilize these funds to accelerate

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CBP’s Enterprise Cloud and Integration Service (ECIS) requirement is planned to be solicited during fiscal year (FY) 2021. ECIS will help manage CBP’s expanding use of commercial cloud across its operations.

Once the application is hosted on a distributed platform, it can be supported by numerous cloud providers, thus lessening the barriers to competition.

8. CBP intends to post this requirement on BETA SAM (formerly the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website) pursuant to FAR 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D).

9. Technical/Requirements Personnel Certification.

10. Contracting Officer Certification.

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JEFO Approvals:

13. HEAD OF CONTRACTING ACTIVITY (Per FAR 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(C)(3) - $15M to $75M)