ASSD EDD27.03_Direct Award Determination.pdf

Proc Folder:

Department of Administration Purchasing Division 2019 Wash ington Street East Post Office Box 50130 Charleston, WV 25305-0130

2087411

State of West Virginia Agency Sole Source Determination

Info Technology

Doc Description: Direct Award - Pantheon, Enterprise Website Hosting Platform

Proc Type: Agency Sole Source

Date Issued Solicitation Closes

2026-10-13 2026-10-27 10:30

BID RECEIVING LOCATION

PROCUREMENT OFFICER

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

BLDG 6, RM 700

1900 KANAWHA BLVD E

CHARLESTON WV 25305

us

VENDOR

Vendor Customer Code:

Vendor Name :

Address:

Street:

City :

State:

Principal Contact :

Vendor Contact Phone:

FOR INFORMATION CONTACT THE BUYER

Michelle L Ch ilders

(304) 558-2686 michelle.childers@k12.wv.us

Vendor Signature X

Date Printed: Oct 13, 2026

Solicitation No

ASSD 0402 EDD2700000003

Country :

Extension:

FEIN#

Page: 1

Reason for Modification:

Version

Zip:

DATE

FORM ID: WV-PRC-ASSD-002 2020/05

All offers subject to all terms and conditions contained in this solicitation

I ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) is publishing direct award determination for renewal of Pantheon Systems, Enterprise Website Hosting Platform.

INVOICE TO SHIP TO

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

BLDG 6, RM 700 OFFICE OF ESEA & IMPROVEMENT SUPPORT

1900 KANAWHA BL VD E 1900 KANAWHA BLVD E, BLDG 6 RM 700

CHARLESTON WV 25305 CHARLESTON WV 25305

us us

Line Comm Ln Desc Qty Unit Issue Unit Price Total Price

Pantheon - Annual Subscription 1.00000 EA

Comm Code Manufacturer Specification Model#

43231500

Extended Description:

Annual Subscription

!SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Line Event Date

Date Printed: Oct 13, 2026 Page : 2 FORM ID: WV-PRC-ASSD-002 2020/05

EDD2700000003

Document Phase

Draft

Document Description

Direct Award - Pantheon, Enterprise Website Hosting Platform

ADDITIONAL TERMS A 'D CONDITTO S

See attached document(s) for additional Terms and Conditions

Page

ED-65

West Virginia Department of Education

DIRECT AWARD POSTING:

Justification and Public Notice Form

Public Notice Instructions

Pursuant to West Virginia Board of Education Policy 8210, the West Virginia Department of Education may award a contract directly to a vendor without competitive bidding if certain requirements are met. Those requirements include documenting justification to support the Direct Award, along with provid ing certain information to the vendor community for a prescribed period of time.

The West Virginia Department of Education intends to make a Direct Award to the vendor identified below to provide the commodity or service identified below. The support for the Direct Award , and any additional documentation has been included in this form or as an attachment.

Vendor Interest: Any vendor interested and able to provide the commodity or service in question must make their interest known , prior to the deadline publ ished in wvOASIS, by expressing such interest in writing to the procurement officer identified as the appropriate contact in wvOASIS. If interest is expressed and deemed to be valid by the procurement officer, this request for Direct Award will be canceled and converted to a competitively bid solicitation .

Direct Award Information

Agency I Department: West Virginia Department of Education

Procurement Officer: Jo Ann Adkins, Purchasing Manager

October 6, 2026 Date of Request: -----------------------------------

1. Provide description of commodity or service (Include a copy of any proposed contract documents):

The West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) is seeking a vendor to host and provide infrastructure for wvde .us, the Department's centra l public website, on the Pantheon .io hosting platform . The platform provides hosting infrastructure, an integrated Content Delivery Network (CON), Apache Solr-based search service, caching performance improvements, a development/test/live environment workflow with additional on-demand development environments, command-line deployment and automation tooling , automated backup and restore, platform-level cybersecurity mon itoring and patching, uptime monitoring, bot protection, auto-scaling, and technical support. The vendor would need to provide platform licensing, techn ical support services , and any upgrades necessary to maintain the availability, accessibility, and security of the Department's public-facing website . These services are used on a D

If requesting software as a sole source, is this software as a service?

[Z] Yes □ No

2. Justification which explains why the direct award is in the best interest of the state:

wvde.us is the Department's primary channel for communicating with county school systems, school administrators , educators, students, families, and the public. It is the primary digital access property for answers related to public education initiatives and programs, certification information and applications , West Virginia Board of Education meetings and policies, for state and federal reporting , for emergency and school closure information, and for the forms , guidance, and applications which county boards of education rely on to operate . Because the Department maintains a single consolidated website rather than a distributed set of properties , any interruption to this platform removes the Department's entire public web presence at once.

The current public website (wvde.us) is an enterprise-scale Drupal CMS application that was not merely deployed to this platform but engineered around it. Approximately $600,000 in vendor technical work and sixteen months of development by two interna l staff produced the site now in production. Over that period, the Department's module selection, caching architecture, search implementation, file storage practices , and deployment workflow were each designed against the platform 's specific architecture and documented constraints . The application relies on the platform's managed Apache Solr search service (Pantheon Search) and its associated connector module, on the platform's granular cache-purging and header system, on its object caching layer, and on its command-line tooling for ~nvironment management and code deployment. ~odule selection was itself constrained by document_ed a

3. Basis for Direct Award: Please select one of the following and provide details and documentation sufficient to confirm the basis .

D Competition is not available from any other source: (If this item is selected answer the question below)

A. The agency attempted to identify other sources by:

0 No other source would be willing or able to replace the existing source without a detrimental effect on the spending unit (Please describe the detrimental effect in detail):

wvde .us is the Department's primary public access website and must remain continuously available . Replacing the hosting platform would not be a transfer of files and data; it would be a re-engineering of the application.

The site's search funct ion is built on the platform 's own Solr service and its required connector module, and would have to be rebuilt and fully reindexed against a different search backend . The site's caching architecture is written to utilize the platform 's granular cache-purging and header system , which is not interchangeable with other providers' caching layers. File storage and temporary file hand ling were implemented to accommodate the platform's distributed container architecture. The Department's development team manages environments, upstream updates, and code deployment through the platform 's command-line tooling , and those workflows and scripts do not transfer.

Beyond that reimplementation work, a migration would require re-tuning performance under production traffic load, retraining development and content staff on a new environment workflow, and executing a DNS and content delivery network cutover. For a Dru pal application of this size and traffic volume, that work cannot be C,...f""lnorf r,nrnnlotorf toctorf ~nrf ,...., ,t rn,or- hofrH'O tho n orornhor 1 ') ')('I')~ term ct~rt u,ithn, ,t ~l""r"On♦ inn ~ ncu-·inrf 0

D Solicitation is categorized as impossible to bid in Section 9 of the Purchasing Handbook and is being posted to determine if competition is available.

4. Other Information Required for Direct Award Posting:

A. A time-period by which delivery must be made or performance must occur:

Performance must begin December 12, 2026 with no lapse in service . wvde .us must remain continuously available; any transition would need to be fully migrated, reimplemented , tested, and cut over prior to that date.

B. The price that will be paid for the commodity or service (include vendor quote) :

See attached vendor quote. $81 ,000 per year for the initial term of December 12, 2026 through December 11 , 2027, with three 1-year renewal options; $324,000 over the full potential term.

C. Any limitations that a competing vendor would need to satisfy:

A competing vendor would need to demonstrate the ability to :

• Host a large-scale Dru pal appl ication at the Department's current traffic volume of approximately 600,000 visits/month and 2,000,000 pages served/month, under a comparable service level agreement.

• Migrate the complete site - code base, database, content, media library, and configuration - with no interruption to public availabil ity, and complete migration, functional testing , performance testing, and cutover prior to December 12, 2026.

• Support the Department's existing Drupal codebase and custom modules without requiring a rebuild, including modules currently configured around the incumbent platform 's architectural constraints .

• Provide a hosted Solr search service with an equivalent Drupal Search API integration , and perform a full reindex of the Department's content with no loss of search functionality or index quality.

• Provide an integrated content delivery network with granular, tag-based cache purging on content update, and reimplement the Department's existing cache inval idation behavior without requ iring the Department to rewrite its caching logic.

• Provide an object caching layer equivalent to the Department's current configuration .

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Agency Procur; Date/ /

For Procurement Officer Use Only

0 Request to Advertise Direct Award Denied

GrRe

OCT O 9 2026

Date:

ED-65 DRAFT RESPONSE

Pantheon Systems, Inc. - Enterprise Website Hosting Platform

Date of Request

October 6, 2026

1. Description of commodity or service

The West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) is seeking a vendor to host and provide infrastructure for wvde.us, the Department's central public website , on the Pantheon.io hosting platform . The platform provides hosting infrastructure, an integrated Content Delivery Network (CON) , Apache Solr-based search service , caching performance improvements, a development/test/live environment workflow with additional on-demand development environments , command-line deployment and automation tooling , automated backup and restore , platform-level cybersecurity monitoring and patching , uptime monitoring, bot protection , auto-scaling , and technical support. The vendor would need to provide platform licensing, technical support services , and any upgrades necessary to maintain the availability, accessibility, and security of the Department's public-facing website . These services are used on a statewide basis in support of West Virginia's public schools and the general public. The intent is to secure pricing to establish an agency-wide contract that will be entered into by the Agency for the benefit and/or participation of the publ ic school system as described above.

If requesting software as a sole source, is this software as a service? 181 Yes □ No

2. Justification which explains why the direct award is in the best interest of the state wvde.us is the Department's primary channel for communicating with county school systems, school administrators, educators, students , families , and the public. It is the primary digital access property for answers related to public education initiatives and programs, certification information and applications, West Virginia Board of Education meetings and policies, for state and federal reporting , for emergency and school closure information, and for the forms , guidance, and applications which county boards of education rely on to operate. Because the Department maintains a single consolidated website rather than a distributed set of properties, any interruption to this platform removes the Department's entire public web presence at once.

The current publ ic website (wvde.us) is an enterprise-scale Drupal CMS application that was not merely deployed to this platform but engineered around it. Approximately $600,000 in vendor technical work and sixteen months of development by two internal staff produced the site now in production . Over that period , the Department's module selection , caching architecture, search implementation , file storage practices , and deployment workflow were each designed against the platform's specific architecture and documented constraints. The application relies on the platform 's managed Apache Solr search service (Pantheon Search) and its associated connector module, on the platform's granular cache-purging and header system , on its object caching layer, and on its command-line tooling for environment management and code deployment. Module selection was itself constrained by aocumented platform considerations, including the unavailability of Apache-dependent modules, the discouragement of modifying web server configuration files in cloud environments and the absence of a shared temporary directory across distributed application containers.

The result is that the Department's Drupal codebase and database cannot simply be transferred to another hosting provider and be expected to run at feature parity . Search, caching, file handl ing , and deployment automation would each require reimplementation on a different provider's equivalent services , followed by full funct ional and performance testing under production load.

The existing platform remains fully functional and continues to meet the Department's requ irements. In preparing th is request the Department reviewed actual platform utilization and reduced the scope of service by removing the MultiZone Failover offering , lowering the annual cost to $81 ,000 - a reduction of $4,000 per year and $16,000 over the full term from current spend. The Department will therefore pay less in the final year of th is agreement than it has paid in each of the past three years.

3. Basis for Direct Award igi No other source would be willing or able to replace the existing source without a detrimental effect on the spending unit

(Describe the detrimental effect in detail):

wvde.us is the Department's primary public access website and must remain continuously available. Replacing the hosting platform would not be a transfer of files and data; it would be a re-eng ineering of the application. The site's search function is built on the platform 's own Solr service and its required connector module, and would have to be rebuilt and fu lly reindexed against a different search backend. The site 's caching architecture is written to utilize the platform 's granular cache-purging and header system , which is not interchangeable with other providers' caching layers . File storage and temporary file handling were implemented to accommodate the platform's distributed conta iner architecture. The Department's development team manages environments , upstream updates, and code deployment through the platform 's command-line tooling , and those workflows and scripts do not transfer.

Beyond that reimplementation work, a migration would requ ire re-tuning performance under production traffic load, retrain ing development and content staff on a new environment workflow, and executing a DNS and content del ivery network cutover. For a Drupal application of this size and traffic volume, that work cannot be scoped, completed, tested , and cut over before the December 12, 2026 term start without accepting a period of degraded service or outage. Such an outage would occur during an active school year and would interrupt public access to certification services , Board meetings and policies , required state and federal reporting , emergency and school closure notices, and the forms and guidance county boards of education depend on . The existing system remains fully functional and meets the Department's requirements ; incurring that operational risk and the associated staff and vendor cost at th is time would not be an efficient use of state funds.

4. Other Information Required for Direct Award Posting

A. A time-period by which delivery must be made or performance must occur:

Performance must begin December 12, 2026 with no lapse in service. wvde. us must remain continuously available; any transition would need to be fully migrated, reimplemented , tested, and cut over prior to that date.

8. The price that will be paid for the commodity or service (include vendor quote):

See attached vendor quote. $81 ,000 per year for the initial term of December 12, 2026 through December 11 , 2027, with three 1-year renewal options ; $324,000 over the full potential term .

C. Any limitations that a competing vendor would need to satisfy:

A competing vendor would need to demonstrate the ability to:

• Host a large-scale Drupal application at the Department's current traffic volume of approximately 600,000 visits/month and 2,000,000 pages served/month , under a comparable service level agreement.

• Migrate the complete site - codebase, database, content, media library, and configuration - with no interruption to public availability, and complete migration, functional testing, performance testing , and cutover prior to December 12, 2026.

• Support the Department's existing Drupal codebase and custom modules without requiring a rebuild , including modules currently configured around the incumbent platform's architectural constraints .

• Provide a hosted Solr search service with an equivalent Drupal Search API integration, and perform a full re index of the Department's content with no loss of search functionality or index quality.

• Provide an integrated content delivery network with granular, tag-based cache purging on content update, and reimplement the Department's existing cache invalidation behavior without requiring the Department to rewrite its caching logic.

• Provide an object caching layer equivalent to the Department's current configuration .

• Provide separate development, test, and live environments with git-based deployment, on-demand additional development environments for feature branches, and command line tooling capable of scripted environment cloning, code deployment, and update management sufficient to replace the Department's existing automation.

• Accommodate the Department's file storage and temporary file handling requirements , including handling of large media files .

• Deliver the migrated site to an accessible management platform in compliance with WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 accessibility requirements , with revalidation completed prior to cutover.

• Meet the State of West Virginia's security, data-handling, and hosting requirements , and provide 24hr RPO (Recovery Point Objective)/48hr RTO (Recovery Time Objective) disaster recovery with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.95% uptime.

• Bear or offset the Department's staff and vendor cost of reimplementation, retraining , and re-testing associated with the transit ion.

l'I PANTHEON.

Tht Platform for Extraordinary Wtbsitts

Pantheon Systems, Inc.

717 California Street, 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94108 United States

(855) 927-9387 billing@pantheon.io

EIN/TAX ID: 35-2387089

BILLING INFORMATION:

West Virginia Department of Education

1900 Kanawha Boulevard East, Bldg 6 R, 700

Charleston West Virgin ia 25305

United States

BILL TO CONTACT:

Michelle Childers

Email: michelle .ch ilders@k12.wv.us

Phone: 304-558-2685

SUBSCRIPTION PLAN :

Payment Terms: Net 30

Currency: USO

Billing Frequency: Annual Order Form

Term: 12 Months

PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Service Offering f----

Diamond Package Ann ual

Elite 1 M Annual

Advanced Global CON with

WAF/10

Secure Integration

Charge Type

Recurring

Recurring

Recurring

Recurring

If multi- year option

•• Final quote not yet approved by Pantheon Deal Desk

Date: October 2, 2026

Order#: QUOTE

Offer Valid Through: December 12, 2026 Proposed By: Gale Wallace

ORDER FORM QUOTE

SOLD TO:

West Virg inia Department of Education

1900 Kanawha Boulevard East, Bldg 6 R, 700

Charleston West Virginia 25305

United States

SOLD TO CONTACT:

Michelle Childers

Email : michelle .childers@k12.wv.us

Phone: 304-558-2685

PO Number (if appl icable):

Tax Exempt: Yes

If appl icable , please provide tax-exempt certificate.

Net Price

$30,000.00

$26,000.00

$18,000.00

$7,000.00

Qty

Net Price:

2026 Invoice

2027 Invoice

2028 Invoice

2029 Invoice

Net Price

$30,000.00

$26,000.00

$18,000.00

$7,000.00

$81,000.00

$81 ,000.00

$81,000.00

$81 ,000.00

$8 1,000.00