Questions_and_Answers__2_for_910031-19-R-0003.xlsx
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- Enterprise Middleware Architecture and Services
- Solicitation number
- 910031-19-R-0003
About this file
This document contains questions and answers related to a solicitation for enterprise middleware architecture and services. The Department of Education, Office of Federal Student Aid is seeking proposals to award an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract to one or more vendors to provide middleware support services. Along with the ID/IQ contract, FSA plans to award two initial task orders to provide support for its existing Integrated Technical Architecture and Enterprise Service Bus middleware. The solicitation is set aside for small businesses and issued under NAICS code 541519. Historically FSA has awarded a single middleware contract every five years but now plans to award a ten-year ID/IQ contract and issue multiple task orders over approximately two and a half year periods to keep up with technology changes and modernization efforts. The questions and answers provide additional details on the scope of services, incumbent contractors, environments, and tools to be supported.
Questions and Answers #2 for 910031-19-R-0003
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Sheet1
| Question Number | Question | Response |
| 1 | 44 applications are supported by Integrated Technical Architecture (ITA). How many real time interfaces and batch interfaces are supported by ITA | ITA provides a supporting infrastructure but incidentally supports realtime and batch interfaces; there are 19 applications that ITA has only real-time interface. Please see RFP Attachment 1 (ITA Performance Work Statement), section B.3, for additional information. |
| 2 | Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is supporting 21 discrete FSA systems and interfacing external partners. How many real time interfaces and batch interfaces are supported by ESB? | There are eight applications that ESB has only real-time interfaces; there are two applications that ESB has only batch interfaces. Rest of them have both batch and real-time interfaces. There are eight applications that consume ESB-hosted web services. |
| 3 | The labor rates proposed for the ID/IQ contract for Years 1 through 3 shall be equal to the labor rates proposed for Task Orders 0001 and 0002 for the same labor categories and time period (e.g., if offering $75 an hour for Category 1: Application Developer (Junior) for the Option Period One for Task Order 0001 – ITA, the Contractor shall propose exactly a $75 rate for Year 2 of the ID/IQ Contract for Category 1: Application Developer (Junior)). Based on the example provided, is the government stating offerors may not escalate pricing for the first three years of the contract? | The pricing in the ID/IQ contact for Years 1 through 3 may escalate, but the prices must be the same as the pricing in Task Orders 0001 and 0002. For example, for Category 1 (Application Developer Junior), if prices are proposed for Task Order's 0001's Base Year at $100 per hour and $101 per hour for Option Period One then the price for the ID/IQ Contract for Category 1 must be $100 for Year One and $101 for Year Two. This stipulation only applies to labor categories used in Task Orders 0001 and 0002. |
| 4 | The FSA integration requirements require niche skill sets that are not easily available even with subcontractor resources. And even if the subs have these resources, they may be engaged on other projects. As such, I was wondering if potential hires would be allowed provided they sign an offer letter (contingent upon winning the award). Obviously, it wouldn't make sense to do this for an entire team but what about a single potential resource like a PM or Architect? | It is acceptable to provide signed offer letters for resources not currently hired by the Prime Contractor or Subcontractors. |
| 5 | Please provide the types of operating systems the applications are currently being run on today. | The operating systems supported include: RHEL 5.11 for ITA and RHEL 6.10 for FAFSA; FSA is in the process of migrating these servers to RHEL 7.5. In addition, we have servers running Windows 2012 R2. |
| 6 | How many application developers are being supported? | FSA does not maintain a list of the specific number of supported application developers, primarily because almost all application developers are not federal employees. |
| 7 | Can you provide an organizational structure of the support team for the current ITA and ESB middleware? How many resources, their responsibilities, etc.? | The answer to this question is contractor proprietary and therefore will not be answered. |
| 8 | Will the pre production environments hardware, software, and or cloud instance be provided by this contract or will it be provided by NGDC? | Likely no hardware or software would be provided by means of the EMAS contract. A decision has not been made regarding a cloud instance, but generally the FSA data center provider would implement the cloud instance with technical assistance from the EMAS Contractor. |
| 9 | If the pre-production infrastructuer is provided by this contact what level of ATO will be needed? | The successful offeror will work with the current NGDC vendor for the ATO approval of the ITA and ESB task order supported activities. |
| 10 | Can FSA provide any RPO or RTO information for disater recovery and continuity of service for the pre-production and production environments. Or will SLA's be developed as part of Task 1 and Task 2? | Please see Section G of RFP Attachments 1 and 2 for the Performance Requirements Summaries, which include all performance metrics. |
| 11 | Are the developers leveraging the end user hardware on the Dept of Ed PIVOT I contract? | There likely will be minimal use of PIVOT contract hardware for EMAS. |
| 12 | How are support calls for middleware routed? | Tier 1 calls are handled by the NGDC vendor. Tier 2 and 3 support shall be provided by the EMAS vendor(s). Refer to Attachments 1 and 2, C.5 Incident and Problem Management Support and 40. Incident and Problem Management Requirement (Work Task). |
| 13 | Does FSA intent the production environment to continue to be hosted in NGDC? | Yes |
| 14 | When the NGDC contract has expired does FSA intent to move some of hosting work into this contract or will NGDC be re-competed? | It is not likely that hosting work that the NGDC is currently responsible for would transition to this contract; however, the current EMAS support provided to the NGDC would likely continue. |
| 15 | Please clarify whether the FAR 52.219-14 clause requirements will be applied to each order, or only to the total work performed under the IDIQ contract. | FAR 52.219-14 – Limitations on Subcontracting (DEVIATION 2019-01) is applied to each specific task order and not at the ID/IQ Contract level. However, past performance assessments may be included at the contract or task order level. |
| 16 | Is the sale of middleware hardware, software, licenses, and/or subscriptions to FSA subject to the 50% limitation specified in the FAR 52.219-14 clause if the small business sells products from the manufacturer (none small business)? A 3rd party reseller (none small business)? Will waivers be granted to avoid violation for products? | The Offeror is responsible for interpreting and meeting the requirements of this clause. FSA does not expect to purchase much hardware, software, licenses, and/or subscriptions under this contract (this is primarily a service-based contract). |
| 17 | What are the FedRAMP requirements from a security compliance standpoint such as FISMA Moderate or FISMA High? | It is FISMA High. |
| 18 | From a FedRAMP certification perspective, what are your requirements such as “in-process”, fully certified, etc.? | FedRamp fully certified |
| 19 | Does the DOE FSA have a preferred cloud provider such as AWS or Azure? | The Government has not decided on cloud platform providers and therefore has no preference. |
| 20 | Based on the FSA’s existing middleware providers, what is their strategy regarding current middleware providers? For example, do they have a direction among the following options: Replace the current legacy middleware tools/vendors? Have the existing middleware tools co-exist with new modern middleware tools/vendors? Keep existing middleware providers and leverage other new tools and technologies? | The requirement for Task Orders 0001 and 0002 is to support the existing components; however, the Government will consider input from the vendor in deciding future strategy, which may require modifications to add or substitute work requirements. |
| 21 | What software/applications/components need to be retained on the mainframe and which parts would you prefer migrated to the cloud? | The requirement for Task Orders 0001 and 0002 is to support the existing components; however the Government will consider input from the vendor in deciding future strategy, which may require modifications to add or substitute work requirements. For sample Task Order 0003, the Offeror is responsible for reading the requirements and developing the appropriate solution(s) in its proposal. |
| 22 | What if a company would like to bid only on a part: Cloud services and application migration, Setting up AWS environment, DB, IBM technologies expert, etc. Do we still have to write entire proposal? How do 'past performance ' dollar amount requirement of $$ xMM play in this case? | Offerors must submit a proposal for all services; the Government will not award partial ID/IQ Contracts or partial Task Order 0001 and 0002 awards. |
| 23 | This rfp is a small business set aside. Would HUB zone or 8a certifications have any additional advantage over regular small business categories excluding HUB Zone / 8a' small businesses? E.g. would you consider HUB zone pricing advantage? | No, no advantages are being afforded to Offerors qualifying as a HubZone or 8(a) firm. |
| 24 | The government referenced an ITA Current State Report which needs to be submitted monthly to the government. The government also mention an annual report of the as-is current state. Will the government explain the difference between the reports? | The annual report on current state is the consolidation and validation of monthly reports. |
| 25 | PWS section C2.3 references 5 environments for ITA software namely, Development, Test, EPT, Staging and Production. The ITA specific servers in attachment 7 – Current State Report lists a total of 9 environments: Acceptance Test, Architecture, Development, EPT, performance Test, Production, Test, Stage, UAT. Will the government please clarify? | There are only 5 types of environments as explained in C.3. However, as explained in the current state report, there are many variants of these environments. |
| 26 | PWS section 10 of the ITA Task Order references ESB support. These requirements are already addressed in task order 002 ESB. Will the government clarify the duplicative information? Can the appropriate section just be referenced from the other response instead of duplicative text? | Both ITA and ESB environments co-exist within the NGDC. There is mutual dependency of these environment and hence mutual support is required. |
| 27 | PWS C.10 of the ITA Task Order is duplicative of requirements located in PWS C.3, C.4, C.6, and C.7. Will the government consider removing PWS C.10? | No, FSA will not remove this requirement. If the Offeror believes services are duplicative, it may address this in their proposal. |
| 28 | Will the Government please clarify whether application development for the hosted systems are included as part of the ITA support? | Hosted system application development is not part of the ITA support. |
| 29 | Should application development be part of the scope for the ITA Task Order? Will the government provide specifics on the hosted applications (architecture, language, number of defects per months, etc.)? | Hosted system application development is not part of the ITA support. |
| 30 | Will the government provide the current Level of Effort (LOE) for ITA’s support? | The answer to this question is contractor proprietary and therefore will not be answered. |
| 31 | Will the government tell us who currently performs the sustainment for the ITA and what the funding value is? | The incumbent contractor is PPS InfoTech, LLC under task order number ED-FSA-14-O-0006 and the amount of funds obligated to date to this task order is $26,238,058.41. |
| 32 | Is the support of AIMS included as part of the ITA middleware Support task order? | No. |
| 33 | Attachment 7 references an EBC environment. It is not clear what the EBC is from the solicitation. There are also references to EBC activities in the section F.4 Deliverables table, transition section with no real information on what it is. Will the government please clarify? | These are incorrect references to EBC. On page 17, section 3.0, EBC should read ESB. Item #37 in section F for Task Order 1 and 2 should refer to ITA and ESB respectively (not EBC). Forthcoming Amendment 0010 corrects these incorrect references. |
| 34 | Does FSA currently use any automation for application deployment within the ITA? If so, will the government provide the specific information and how it integrates with the various data centers? | The Government does not use automation for application deployment. However, we welcome Offerors' input. |
| 35 | The Wily monitoring tool contains multiple product, can the government provide the specific modules used? | There are various versions of CA Wily that are deployed. These versions are all being upgraded to 10.7. |
| 36 | Is Wily used across all datacenters? | Yes. We have only one datacenter - NGDC. |
| 37 | Will the government specify current gaps with the Wily monitoring tool? | We have Wily Monitoring Version 9.0, 9.1, 9.6, and 9.7 currently deployed. All are being upgraded to Version 10.7. We request the Offerors to review the specifications of this COTS product. |
| 38 | Does the wily monitoring tool used to monitor application server, and database server instances or is it only at the application server? | Wily is installed on both app servers and database servers at the NGDC. |
| 39 | Will the government describe the current Disaster recovery environment? It is not present in attachment 7. | The disaster recovery environment is similar to the NGDC production environment. |
| 40 | The ITA PWS Section 10.1 references Application enhancements. Does this mean that application development work for the hosted applications such as FSA is included in the scope of the ITA middleware task order? | Hosted system application development is not part of the ITA support. |
| 41 | Section C.11 of the ITA middleware support references “support development of J2EE applications.” Does this mean that there are application development tasks associated to this task? If so, can the government specify the line of codes and average application changes per FSA systems? This information will be useful for the staffing requirement. | Hosted system application development is not part of the ITA support. |
| 42 | Will the Government consider increasing the page count of both Volume III and Volume IV to 50 pages to accommodate for detailed technical approaches? | The Government will not increase the page count of Volume III and Volume IV at this time. |
| 43 | Will the government provide documentation on the current API architecture? | Forthcoming Amendment 0010 provides information that addresses this question. |
| 44 | How does the API support referenced in the ITA middleware task order different from the API support referenced in the ESB task order? | APIs for ITA relate to COTS products and applications in the ITA environment. APIs for ESB relate to COTS products and applications in the ESB environment. |
| 45 | Will the government provide the current Level of Effort (LOE) for the ESB support? | The answer to this question is contractor proprietary and therefore will not be answered. |
| 46 | Will the government provide information on the current ESB monitoring solution? | Scripts have been developed to provide monitoring. |
| 47 | Will the government provide information on the current ESB COOP solution? | ESB is documented in the Current State. Please refer to EITA Current State document (Attachment 6) and supporting appendices, which were added by means of Amendment 0002. |
| 48 | Section C.10.1 – Core O&M Support and Evergreening in the ESB Task Order references capabilities such as Authentication API, Email, IMAP and search which are identical to the components from the ITA enterprise middleware task order. It is not clear which task order will be responsible for the maintenance of these tools. Will the Government please clarify so that bidders may appropriately staff the task orders? | The RFP has been amendmed to specify IMAP is ITA; Search is ITA; and Authentication is removed (it is part of AIMS, which will not be part of EMAS). Email is in both ITA and ESB |
| 49 | Is the MSIT tool a custom application? If so, is the code associated with this custom application supported within this task order? Can the government provide more information on the MSIT tool? | MSIT is a custom written Java web app that provides monitoring of the MQ servers and the validation of the MQ Message transfer. As part of the ESB task order, this application has to be supported. |
| 50 | Will the government explain the current management tools used for the ESB environment? | Wily versions 9.0, 9.1, 9.6, and 9.7 are currently installed in the NGDC; all of them are being upgraded to Version 10.7. MSIT monitors the MQ Servers and the MQ message transfers. |
| 51 | Will the government explain current capabilities as it regards to the Enterprise Service Gateway? | For the purposes of EMAS it can be assumed that the ESG capabilities are limited to the ESB services provided as part of the Current State Report. Please refer to EITA Current State document (Attachment 6) and supporting appendices, which were added by means of Amendment 0002. |
| 52 | Section C.10.5 – Support Database Management: What is the difference between the Database support from the ESB Task Order and the database support from the ITA Task Order? | Database support from ITA relates to applications experiencing incidents that are in the ITA environment that use a database. Database support from ESB relates to applications experiencing incidents that use or consume ESB-provided services. |
| 53 | Because of the similarity in support functions, will the government consider combining the ITA task order requirements with the ESB support task order? Staffing, support processes, and application deployment-related activities can be combined with research and technology insertion activities to optimize support for both, which can provide cost savings to the Government. | The Government will not combine the two task orders at this time. |
| 54 | With regard to the Experience Evaluation Document Section B, which is to be completed by the Government, how would the Government like Section B to be submitted? Should bidders request their Government POCs to send the Experience Evaluation Document directly to the to FSAEAT@ed.gov email referenced in Section VI, 6, or should Government POCs give this information to the bidders to submit with our proposals? | As stated in Section VII - Evaluation Criteria, 5.4 of the RFP, "The Government will evaluate the Experience Evaluation Documents that were found acceptable submissions for Go/No Go Factor One (Experience) by contacting the references to assess the Contractor’s past performance and completing Section B of each Experience Evaluation Document." In other words, FSA will contact the appropriate references and complete Section B. |
| 55 | In further reviewing and populating the ‘experience evaluation’ document, we realized that the updated document is hard to follow due to the extensive details provided in the ‘service description’ cell. As such, it will be hard for evaluators to review and understand the content without going back and forth across multiple pages due to the nature of the table format. Would FSA consider splitting the evaluation document into two? 1). Keep the evaluation document as-is but allow vendors to provide a brief description of the services performed in the ‘service description’ cell 2). Allow vendors to provide a detailed description of the each past performance under a separate section | This document will not be changed at this time. |
| 56 | Will the government clarify the difference between Position and Title? For instance, if the LCAT is Senior Security Manager and Position is Primary Lead for Security Requirements, what information does the government want for Title? | Position and Title may be the same, but Title may also refer to the function of the individual in the vendor's staffing approach. |
| 57 | The government indicates the total phase in period, beginning directly after award, is 120 days. The period between the contract award date and the contract start day will be 60 days. Following that, a 60-day (two-month) transition-in period begins. However, during the pre-proposal conference, we thought we heard the government say there would only be a 90-day phase in period (30 days between award and contract start date, 60 days for transition-in). Would the government please clarify the phase in/transition in timeframes? | The Cover Page states the following: "Task Orders 0001 and 0002 will have a start date of no less than one month from their award dates (e.g., if the award date is June 20, 2019, the start date of the transition-in period for each order will begin on or after July 20, 2019)." Because the start of the task orders will be one month following the date of award and Offerors will have two months of transition, the total phase in/transition is approximately 90 days. Forthcoming Amendment 0010 corrects the incorrect reference to 120 days. |
| 58 | Do the attached FPDS records count towards page count in volume I? | Yes, the first page of the FPDS records count toward the page count in Volume I. |
| 59 | Attachment 3, Section B is to be completed by the government after award. As such, do offerors need to include Section B in Volume I? If so, does Section B apply towards the Volume I page count? | Section B is part of the Attachment 3 (Experience Evaluation Document) which is to be filled out by the Government after submission. Proposals need to include Attachment 3, Section B, in Volume I, and it will apply toward the Volume I page count. However, the page count is planned to be increased to 30 via forthcoming Amendment 0010. |
&"-,Bold"&26Questions and Answers #2 for RFP No. 910031-19-R-0003
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