NNG15SD25B-078.pdf

CA IAM UIM & APM Licenses and Control Number: TAC-19-55862 Maintenance Support

JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, NJ 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for the issuance of a firm-fixed-price delivery order under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC), for brand name Computer Associates (hereinafter referred to as CA) Application Performance Management (APM) and CA Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) software licenses, software maintenance, and technical support.

3. Description of Supplies or Services: VA Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Enterprise Program Management Office, Identity and Access Management (IAM) office has a requirement for 100 brand name CA APM software licenses (optional quantities) and 326 brand name CA UIM software licenses, software maintenance, and technical support. The CA APM and UIM software are required for monitoring and managing the availability and performance of the IAM applications and systems.

In order to function in IAM’s current environment, the CA APM and UIM software will require perpetual software licenses for CA APM Agent, CA APM Manager for CA Single Sign On (SSO), and CA Nimsoft Monitor Server and Application also known as UIM. Software maintenance and technical support will consist of 24x7x365 web-based self-service support, patches, fixes, remote diagnostics, and release updates.

The 426 perpetual CA APM and UIM software licenses shall be delivered 30 days from date of award. Period of performance for the software maintenance and technical support shall be for 12 months from July 11, 2019 to July 10, 2020, with two 12-month option periods for continued software maintenance of the CA APM and UIM licenses. In addition, there are six optional tasks to purchase 200 additional software licenses (100 APM and 100 UIM software licenses) and software maintenance and technical support for 808 software licenses (for 232 APM software licenses and 576 UIM software licenses) to support an increase in the user base for IAM systems over the subsequent out years. The optional tasks for the additional software licenses shall be exercised in either the base or option period 1 or option period 2.

4. Statutory Authority: Pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Subpart 16.505(a)(4), the following brand name requirement is being justified and approved as an exception to fair opportunity under the statutory authority of Section 41 U.S.C.

4106(c)(2) as implemented by FAR Subpart 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B), entitled “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.”

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: Based on market research, as described in paragraph 8 of this justification, it was determined that limited competition is available among resellers for brand name CA APM and UIM software licenses, software maintenance, and technical support. Only CA APM and UIM software can meet all of VA’s interoperability, compatability, and functional requirments. Specifcally, the CA APM and UIM software are the only software that can integrate both with the VA Enterprise Service Desk (ESD) and with CA Service Operations Insight used by VA Enterprise Operations (EO) to provide proactive management, seamless trouble ticket tracking, and full end-to-end visibility to enable better diagnostics and resolution in support of IAM Services. CA APM and UIM software is the only brand name software that allows the IAM team to meet a key VA functional requirement to provide consolidated alerts which would simplify information going to the ESD. Since VA ITOPS EO is currently using the same APM and UIM software suite from CA, it will be seamless to provide end-to-end monitoring across the VA landscape and VA Enterprise Cloud Microsoft Azure Government environments where IAM systems are hosted. This proposed action is to increase the exisiting infrastcute due to increased demands. The exisiting infrastructure is only comprised of CA APM and UIM softwares that communicates through CA’s proprietary coding structure. No other brand name software, other than CA APM and UIM software, would be able to communicate with the exisiting CA brand name licesnes. Specifically, VA’s IAM office currently has 232 CA APM licenses, 576 CA UIM licenses, and other services to support those licenses such as training and maintenance. If another brand name software was used, it would result in replacing this entire infrastructure which would result in duplicated costs of X to include piloting a new solution while supporting nearly 750 production applications and troubleshooting outside of the current enterprise solution in place.

The original deployment took three full-time system engineers approximately one year to deploy IAM’s current APM and UIM solution. This is based on previous efforts to create the infrastructure. Replacing the current IAM infrastructure would result in extensive delivery delays, reduction in critical functionality, and extensive duplication of costs that would not be recovered through competition. For this reason, any other brand name software would require a complete redesign, reengineering, and redevelopment of the existing IAM infrastructure. VA intends to continue using the VA owned CA licensing, therefore the procurement of another APM and server monitoring solution would result in having two independent solutions operating in parallel which would result in duplicated costs of millions of dollars on top of the already in production CA software.

In addition, CA APM and UIM software is the only brand name software that can meet all of VA’s fuctional requirments. CA APM and UIM software is the only brand name software that can provide the IAM program with the critical data needed to both diagnose issues before end-users are affected and properly report business level and service level metrics back to the business side. With real end-user traffic data, the IAM Team will be able to gain insight needed to make infrastructure changes to improve application delivery, identifying where the problems are within the infrastructure, and providing detailed analysis to understand the cause of performance degradation. CA APM is the only software that provides integrated performance management for CA Siteminder which is an integral component of the VA IAM SSOi platform. CA Siteminder is a proprietary software (not Java based) that does not allow for any third-party Application Performance monitoring software to gather performance metrics of its Policy servers, Web agents, and user store;

thus, third-party software cannot provide root cause visibility into Siteminder software. CA has a customized offering that leverages the CA-owned source code of CA APM, UIM, and CA Siteminder to provide the visibility and metrics to troubleshoot performance, identify components of the system, and integrate to existing VA applications already monitored by CA APM. With the CA APM and UIM software for the VA IAM platform, VA will be able to have full visibility into both infrastructure and application components, thus enabling the most efficient management capability. CA UIM is a unique and comprehensive information technology (IT) monitoring software that provides full visibility into systems and infrastructure performance. CA UIM is VA OIT’s IT Operations and Services (ITOPS) required software for hardware monitoring. With CA UIM supporting up to 140 technologies, IAM can rely on a single monitoring and management solution that is easy to implement and scalable to address IAM complex infrastructure environments.

Due to ITOPS and IAM acquiring CA APM and UIM, the IAM team is provided with a single integrated solution for application and infrastructure availability, performance, transaction metrics, and consolidated alerts while minimizing support costs and downtime. CA’s monitoring suite of product licenses and maintenance support is identical to the existing EO’s monitoring systems and current business needs which are specific to supporting and assisting the Enterprise Veterans Self Services program by troubleshooting and resolving applications issues. This is a VA functional requirement that only the CA APM and UIM software can meet. Finally, only CA, or its resellers, can provide the professional services required by VA. Any other source other than CA, or its resellers, would need access to CA proprietary data in order to understand the mechanics of the software at a level required to properly design, configure, and implement the required CA software.

IAM is an Enterprise-Level pillar within VA which provides services to both internal and external customers. IAM has built several critical Access Services applications utilizing the CA Identity and Access Management software suite, which includes CA Siteminder, CA Identity Manager, CA Directory, and CA SSO. The VA Enterprise- Level Single-Sign-On Internal (SSOi) service currently provides SSO functionality to internal VA Users utilizing their Personal Identity Verification card, Active Directory, or Windows Authentication credentials to access over more than 300 VA internal applications. IAM compliance with the VA directive to require all VA applications to conform to a Two-Factor authentication method will impose an enormous demand on IAM’s SSOi service. Hence, it is critical that the IAM Team obtain the capability to monitor, manage, anticipate, and quickly resolve performance issues of its applications and systems. Failure to acquire the aforementioned CA APM and UIM products would result in the IAM program’s inability to properly monitor and assure the performance and availability of VA IAM services. CA’s monitoring suite provides application health awareness nearly 750 applications that consume IAM services to proactively prevent and address service disruptions by detecting and directing resolution of issues before end users see any impact to the applications.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in section 8 of this justification. This effort did not yield any additional sources that can meet the Government’s requirements. It was determined, however, that limited competition is viable among resellers for brand name CA APM and UIM software licenses, software maintenance, and technical support. In accordance with FAR 16.505(b)(4)(iii)(A)(2), this justification will be provided with the solicitation to all interested NASA SEWP V GWAC holder. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and FAR 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D), notice of award of the resulting order will be synopsized and the justification will be made publicly available within 14 days after award on the Federal Business Opportunities website.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: The Government will continue to conduct market research to ascertain if there are changes in the market place that would enable future actions to be competed.

8. Market Research: Market research was conducted on April 19, 2019 to ascertain other products which may satisfy VA’s requirements. Specifically, the features and functionality were examined for the product lines. The monitoring tool software do not meet the VA’s functional and interoperability requirements as outlined in Section 5 of this justification. The Government's technical experts have concluded that only brand name CA APM and UIM software licenses, software maintenance, and technical support meet all of the Government's requirements.

Additional market research was performed in June 2019 utilizing the NASA SEWP V GWAC Provider Lookup tool, which resulted in the identification of multiple resellers of the required brand name CA APM and UIM software licenses and associated services. As a result, there is a reasonable expectation for limited competition on the NASA SEWP V GWAC for the brand name CA APM and UIM software licenses, software maintenance, and technical support.

9. Other Facts: None.