Software_Asset_Management_-_Request_for_Proposal_-_75N97019R00012.docx

National Institutes of Health Office of the Chief Information Officer RFP No. 75N97019R00012

1. REQUEST NO.

75N97019R00012

2. DATE ISSUED

07/15/2019

3. REQUISITION/PURCHASE REQUEST NO.

NIH Software Asset Management

5a. ISSUED BY National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD 20892

6. DELIVER BY (Date)

OTHER

FOB DESTINATION (See Schedule)

NAME

Russell Reeves

TELEPHONE NUMBER

AREA CODE

NUMBER

827-6404

9. DESTINATION

a. NAME OF CONSIGNEE

8. TO:

10. PLEASE FURNISH QUOTATIONS TO THE ISSUING OFFICE IN BLOCK 5a ON OR BEFORE CLOSE OF BUSINESS (Date)

08/05/2019 at 12:00 noon.

IMPORTANT: This is a request for information and quotations furnished are not offers. If you are unable to quote, please so indicate on this form and return it to the address in Block 5a. This request does not commit the Government to pay any costs incurred in the preparation of the submission of this quotation or to contract for supplies or service. Supplies are of domestic origin unless otherwise indicated by quoter. Any representations and/or certifications attached to this Request for Quotation must be completed by the quoter.

ISSUE

PRICE

1.

2.

3.

NIH Software Asset Management – Period of Performance: 12-month base period with 2 successive one-year Options

Base Period:

NIH Software Asset Management Support NIH Software Asset Management - Optional

Option Period One:

NIH Software Asset Management Support NIH Software Asset Management - Optional

Option Period Two:

NIH Software Asset Management Support NIH Software Asset Management - Optional

12. DISCOUNT FOR PROMPT PAYMENT

a. NAME OF QUOTER

c. COUNTY

AREA CODE

INSTRUCTIONS TO OFFERORS

The enclosed RFP is to provide support for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH is issuing a competitive solicitation to qualified vendors in accordance with FAR Part 13. This requirement is being processed under combined synopsis/solicitation for commercial items prepared in accordance with FAR 12.6.

Interested parties should submit their proposal in accordance with the following instructions.

Offerors are required to submit both a written Technical Proposal and Business Proposal to government officials for the purposes of acquiring supplies and/or services from an Offeror that is fully cognizant of the scope of this requirement and has the capability to meet all objectives described in the solicitation. Proposals that merely offer to conduct a program in accordance with the requirements of the government’s scope of work will not be eligible for award.

FAR 52.216-1 TYPE OF CONTRACT (APR 1984)

The government contemplates award of a hybrid firm fixed price (FFP) and time & materials (T&M) contract as a result of this notice. The government intends to evaluate proposals and award a contract without discussions with Offerors. However, the government reserves the right to conduct discussions if later determined by the Contracting Officer to be necessary.

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE

The resulting award period of performance is a base period of 12 months with two (2) 12-month option periods, unless the period is extended by modification to this task order. Option periods are subject to availability of funds and may be unilaterally exercised by the government.

SOLICITATION TECHNICAL INQUIRIES AND QUESTIONS

All questions regarding the solicitation, of a contractual nature or technical nature, must be submitted in writing via email to Russell Reeves, reevesru@mail.nih.gov. All questions received prior to submission deadline will be answered, Questions with the government’s responses will be posted. Please be advised that the government reserves the right to transmit those questions and answers of a common interest to all prospective Offerors.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION

Proposals must be submitted via NLM's Electronic Contract Proposal Submission (eCPS) system at https://ecps.nih.gov/, no later than 12:00 p.m., (Eastern-Daylight Savings Time), August 5, 2019.

NOTE: For directions on using eCPS, go to https://ecps.nih.gov/ and click on "How to Submit." To submit your electronic proposal using eCPS, all offerors must have a valid NIH External Directory Account, which provides authentication and serves as a vehicle for secure transmission of documents and communication with the NLM. The NIH External Directory Account registration process may take up to 24 hours to become active. Submission of proposals by facsimile or e-mail is not accepted.

1.1 FORMATTING

Page size must be 8.5 by 11 inches with 1-inch margins. Paragraphs must be single spaced. Minimum font size/style must be 10-point Times New Roman font for Text, 9-point font in the Arial family for Tables, and 8-point font in the Arial family for Graphics. Tables and graphics may be landscape; all other text must be portrait. Document must be compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1972, as amended (29 U.S.C. 794d), Subpart D - Information, Documentation, and Support.

If the Offeror uses a different format (font size, margin, etc.), the government reserves the right to adjust the proposal to fit the parameters of the format as stated in the RFP, and if this results in the proposal exceeding the page limitations in any one area, the government will not consider those excess pages.

The below table shows the page limits to which Offeror submissions must adhere.

Section 5: SLAs and Performance Standards

Table 1: Proposal Page Count

1.2 TRANSMITTAL AND COVER LETTER (VOLUME 1)

The Offeror’s Transmittal and Cover Letter (Volume 1) for the proposal must contain the name, phone number, and e-mail address of the person to be contacted concerning any matter related to the solicitation. Include the following information in your Cover Letter:

· DUNS number and TIN

· Company name, mailing address, and website address

· Date submitted and proposal expiration date

· All the above-cited information for each entity on the proposed team, if a team is proposed

· Do you have a government-approved accounting system? If so, please identify the agency that approved the system

· Type of company (i.e., small business, 8(a), woman owned, veteran owned, etc.) as validated via the System for Award Management (SAM). All Offerors must register in SAM located at http://www.sam.gov/

· Company point of contact, phone and email address.

1.3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (SECTION 1)

The Offeror should provide an Executive Summary (Volume 1, Section 1) for the technical proposal. In the executive summary, the Offeror should highlight the significant factors of its technical proposal. The executive summary for the technical approach must be no more than 1 page long.

EVALUATION

The Offeror’s Technical and Business Proposals will be reviewed and evaluated in accordance with the evaluation criteria identified below in Table 2: Evaluation Factors.

The first two factors: A. Technical Approach and B. Experience and Past Performance are of equal importance. The two factors: C. Usability and D: Service Level Agreements and Deliverables are of secondary importance. Sub-factors listed under each factor are of equal importance to each other.

Table 2: Evaluation Factors Proposals that include either prime vendors or teaming partners that are software resellers will be rejected.

1.4 RATINGS

The government will evaluate Factors A-D using the following adjectival rating:

Table 3: Adjectival Descriptions

1.5 TECHNICAL PROPOSAL EALUATION (VOLUME 1)

Offeror shall provide a Technical Proposal (Volume 1, Sections 2-4) that addresses the following four evaluation criteria:

A. Technical Approach (Section 2) B. Experience and Past Performance (Section 3) C. Usability (Section 4) D. Deliverables and SLAs (Section 5) Technical Approach (Section 2):

Describe your technical approach for meeting the objectives stated in the PWS.

a. Automated Inventory: Given the conditions stated in the PWS, describe your solution for achieving the objective of obtaining an accurate snapshot of NIH software usage on all platforms at any given time in the NIH software inventory.

Your description must include your proposed method for:

i. Obtaining software usage data on all platforms, to include custom and/or COTS tools you propose that will augment BigFix capabilities for identifying usage on BigFix’s unsupported platforms.

ii. Providing representative and trustworthy visibility into software usage.

iii. Sharing inventory information with all IC’s across NIH.

iv. Reducing duplications, false positives, anomalies and discrepancies, and for classifying discovery and usage data requiring additional analysis.

v. Verifying and completing additional steps analysis to confirm all data provides and accurate representation of inventories and usage.

vi. Collecting and analyzing non-discovered and undiscoverable data.

vii. Transferring all NIH-owned data to NIH or a follow-on contractor team upon contract conclusion and a description of the data format that will support that transfer.

b. Entitlement and Licensing Analysis: Given the conditions stated in the PWS, describe your solution for achieving the objective of an accurate accounting of all NIH software entitlements at any given time in an NIH software license management database.

Your description must include your proposed method for:

i. Capturing entitlement data from PRISM for use in your software license management tool.

ii. Reducing duplications, false positives, anomalies and discrepancies in entitlement data: harmonizing and cleaning the data.

iii. Managing entitlement data.

iv. Creating NIH Effective License Positions (ELP).

v. Transferring all NIH-owned data to NIH or a follow-on contractor team upon contract conclusion and a description of the data format that will support that transfer.

c. License Positions and Recommendations: Given the conditions stated in the PWS, describe your solution for optimizing new license agreements and maintenance on existing ‘enterprise’ agreements so that NIH does not over or under procure licenses and NIH is able to secure the best value for its investment.

Your description must include your proposed method for:

i. Reconciling entitlement data against software usage for software on all platforms.

ii. Identifying software that is enterprise-wide versus IC-owned.

Suggest priorities and sequences of activities with milestones for optimizing the NIH software investment.

d. Software Ordering (Optional): Given the conditions stated in the PWS, describe your solution for minimizing waste during the software order/request process.

e. Transition Out (Optional): Given the requirements stated in the PWS, describe your approach for Transition Out.

Experience and Past Performance (Section 3)

a. Describe how your team has achieved objectives in other organizations that are the same or similar to NIH’s objectives. For each of the examples provided, describe the following:

· Name and address of organization

· Points of contact within the organization that managed your engagement (project manager, COTR, contracting officer, or equivalent if the project was with the private sector), along with email addresses and phone numbers.

· Description of the project.

· Contract number.

· Contract amount.

· Value of software inventory.

· Savings attributed to your efforts.

· Period of performance and duration of engagement.

· How the characteristics of the organizational examples provided are similar to or different than NIH’s (such as size of organization, public versus private, carrier selection, demographics, etc.).

b. Describe the team you propose for the NIH engagement. Abbreviated resumes for key personnel and letters of commitment (not included in the page count) are required for all proposed staff. Resumes should be limited to three pages.

Usability (Section 4) Since the Offeror should be the entity responsible for using the tools needed to perform this body of work, usability for NIH is measured by the efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction of the visualizations provided by the Offeror.

a. Provide a two-hour tour of your analytical capabilities to NIH evaluators, ensuring that you describe how the analytics support NIH PWS objectives.

b. Provide examples of reports and other visualizations of data from BigFix and/or other tools you propose using for analytical purposes. Describe the visualizations and how they support decision-making and the PWS objectives.

c. Provide examples if you can report on usage and entitlements on cloud hosted software and services. Describe your approach.

d. Provide examples on how you plan to manage software assets in modern infrastructure environment that includes deployed containers in private and public cloud.

e. Provide a demonstration of how your proposed solution will take BigFix or Splunk data and generate discrete and accurate inventory items. Following are the expectations from the demo session:

· NIH will provide data in text files as output obtained by BigFix. These may be CSV files and it will be the vendor’s responsibility to use that in any other format if desired.

· Data will be provided by 9:00 a.m. EST and the vendor will provide a sample of the output at 5:00 p.m. on the same day.

· The output shall be an inventory report in Microsoft Excel or PDF or both depending on the vendor’s capabilities.

· The report will be evaluated on its accuracy, comprehensiveness, and readability.

· Since, NIH will not be able to provide contract information for entitlement reports for this demo, it is only expected that the vendors will be able to provide usage report from the BigFix sample provided to them.

· Use raw BigFix export provided by NIH and create report that can describe the usage information at a glance. The raw export will not be clean. Hence, the vendor can demonstrate the ability to clean data and create report through an automated tool.

Deliverables and Service Level Agreements (Section 5) The Offeror shall propose and be evaluated on deliverables and Service Level Agreements (SLA) and performance standards.

a. Deliverables: Describe the deliverables and associated delivery schedule proposed. Include when the deliverables will be provided. At a minimum, the following deliverables and delivery schedule must be included. The schedule is expressed in terms of calendar days.

Implementation Project Plan

Draft – 30 days after Task Order award Final – 60 days after Task Order award

Table 4. Deliverable Schedule

b. Service Level Agreements: The table below, Table 5: SLAs and Performance Standards leaves some standards incomplete so that the Offeror may propose certain SLA terms. The Offeror may also turn track changes on and edit any other information in the table and submit a revised SLA as part of the Offeror’s proposal. The Offeror may also add topics and measures to the table. NIH will evaluate the strength of the proposed changes and its impact on the services delivered during the RFP evaluation process. If for any reason NIH is unable to accommodate the Offeror’s suggested changes, NIH will discuss a mutually beneficial compromise.

Contractor provides root cause analysis and remediation plan, along with tracking until the root cause is resolved and successfully remediated, as determined by the COR.

Contractor provides root cause analysis and remediation plan, along with tracking until the root cause is resolved and successfully remediated, as determined by the COR.

Table 5: SLAs and Performance Standards

1.6 BUSINESS PROPOSAL (VOLUME 2)

The Offeror’s Business Proposal (Volume 2) shall be a separate volume from the Technical Proposal. Pricing shall include all anticipated costs to fully perform all objectives as stated in the solicitation including option year pricing.

Technical Factors are more important than cost or price. Selection of the Offeror to perform this task order will be based on NIH’s assessment of the best overall value.

Subcontractor rate information shall also be included, if applicable. List all costs used to build the proposed FFP cost. For the purposes of estimating level of effort for this contract, NIH assumes approximately three to five full time equivalents (FTE) will be needed throughout the period of performance (not including optional services) and provisioning of tools and utilities to meet objectives. Business Proposals shall include the estimated price per Contract Line Item Number (CLIN) (per year of effort).

Cost/Price Realism Offerors will be evaluated based upon cost/price completeness and accuracy to determine the validity of the price, cost/price realism, cost/price reasonableness, and cost/price risk. The factors below will be used to assess whether the Offerors' proposal is complete, accurate, and realistic to minimize cost or performance risk.

a. Cost/Price Completeness and Accuracy: The government will review the cost/ price schedules for completeness and accuracy. A determination will be made as to whether the Offeror has properly understood the business proposal instructions and properly completed the cost/price schedules. Changes to the evaluation quantities, blanks or zeros in the pricing columns, and/or mathematical mistakes are subject to clarification for confirmation of the Offeror’s intent. The Offeror's proposal will be checked for mathematical correctness to include the following:

· Checking arithmetic in all computations.

· Making sure that all prices/costs are summarized correctly.

· Comparing electronic submittals with hard copies; if applicable.

A determination will be made regarding whether the cost/price appears unbalanced, either for the total cost/price of the proposal or separately priced line items. An analysis will be made by item, quantity, and year to identify any irregular or unusual pricing patterns. An unbalanced proposal is one that incorporates prices that are less than cost for some items and/or prices that are overstated for other items.

b. Cost/Price Realism: The Offerors are placed on notice that any proposals that are unrealistic in terms of technical commitment or unrealistically low in cost(s) and/or price will be deemed reflective of an inherent lack of technical competence or indicative of failure to comprehend the complexity and risk of contract requirements and may be grounds for rejection of the proposal.

c. Cost/Price Reasonableness: The Offerors are expected to establish a reasonable price relationship between all cost/price elements. An evaluation of the Offerors’ price proposals will be made to determine if they are realistic for the work to be performed, reflect a clear understanding of the requirements, and are consistent with the Technical Proposal.

Reasonableness determinations will be made by determining if competition exists, by comparing proposed cost/price with established commercial prices, other contract vehicles, and/or by comparing proposed cost/price with the Independent Government Cost Estimate (IGCE). The IGCE is not releasable to the public.

d. Cost/Price Risk: Risk refers to any aspect of the Offerors’ proposals that could have significant negative cost consequences for the government. Proposals will be assessed to identify potential risks. Where cost/price risk is assessed, it may be described in quantitative terms or used as a best-value discriminator.

Proposed Costs

1. Services: The costs are FFP with a base year and 2 (successive) option years to support full Software Asset Management capabilities.

2. Transition Out (Optional): The Offeror shall provide an FFP at a per month increment to achieve transition out activities. The government expects Transition Out to last three (3) months. Transition Out activities shall occur while contracted services also occur.

CONTRACT AWARD

Contract award shall be made to the responsible Offeror whose offer, in conforming to this RFP, provides an overall best value to the government, technical evaluation factors, and cost considered. The government's objective is to obtain the highest technical quality considered necessary to achieve the project objectives, with a realistic and reasonable cost. Technical evaluation factors are more important than cost. In the event quotes are evaluated as technically equal in quality, price or cost will become a major consideration in selecting the successful Offeror.

Instructions to Offerors Page 12 of 12