FY21 JA Veritas Veritas VA-21-00063655 redacted.pdf

VA-21-00063655

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 a firm-fixed price task order issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Governmentwide Acquisition Contract

(GWAC) for brand name Veritas Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) software licenses, maintenance, and support services.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: VA Office of Information and Technology (OI&T), Information Technology Operations and Services, Infrastructure Operations, Austin Information Technology Center (AITC) has a requirement to procure four (4) additional eDiscovery Platform PPAR (OnPrem) 2 Terabyte licenses, and 12 months of maintenance and support for eDiscovery Platform PPAR (OnPrem, hosted at AITC for use by VA's Office of General Counsel (OGC)) for each license. The software allows users to perform preservation, processing (such as decryption and de-duplication), searching, review, analysis, and production of electronically stored information including email. This assists attorneys, custodians of relevant information, and other Ol&T personnel in accomplishing their required discovery and auditing tasks more efficiently. Ol&T personnel use Veritas eDiscovery in the event they need to assist in litigation and criminal cases where email users attempt to circumvent controls and try to prevent VA investigators and OGC from accessing their email and associated document archives. The required software maintenance and support includes security patches, software updates and standard 24 hours per day, 7 days per week commercial telephone and web technical support to ensure the software remains operational. Licenses shall be delivered within five business of days of receipt of order. The period of performance for the maintenance support shall be from June 15, 2021 to April 02, 2022 to align with another existing task order and include one (1) 12-month option period for renewal of the software maintenance and support described above.

4. Statutory Authority: Pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.505(a)(4), the following brand name requirement is being justif ied 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 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 section eight of this document, the Government has determined that limited competition is available for this action among resellers for the required brand name Veritas eDiscovery software licenses, maintenance and support. No other source, apart from Veritas or its resellers, is capable of providing the required licenses or software

FY21 Veritas eDiscovery VA-21-00063655 maintenance and support. This acquisition would expand the existing set of 18TB PPAR licenses already purchased and in use by VA, which run off 23 Veritas brand physical servers (also referred to as “appliances”) which reside in a computer room in AITC. The licenses are applied directly to and managed from these servers. Any additional licenses must be compatible with the existing Veritas eDiscovery appliances and only the Veritas licenses are compatible with these appliances. Use of another brand would result in significant additional cost, estimated at approximately $1.9M based on previous acquisition history and current market pricing to replace the existing licensing alone. In addition to replacing the existing licenses, additional costs, estimated at $1.7M based on market research, would be incurred to replace the existing appliances, perform data migration, train VA staff and require extensive modification of reporting features that are utilizing the discovered data in the application. These additional costs would not be expected to be recovered even through competition. With respect to the required software maintenance and support, only Veritas or its resellers have access to the proprietary source code necessary to provide the required software updates, security patches and technical support. Since the software is proprietary, a legal restriction is placed on access to the software code that is required in order to develop updates and patches to the software. Without this access it is impossible to modify the software code as necessary to provide the required patches and updates. Access to this code is also required to ensure the services provided to the software are properly configured. Failure to acquire these additional licenses will impact VA OGC and Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection’s ability to effectively preserve, collect, process, review and produce VA Electronically Stored Information, as mandated by Federal Law, Congress, and Presidential Executive Order 13793.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in section eight of this document. This effort did not yield any additional sources for the required software maintenance and support that can meet the Government's requirements. Although the Government is limiting competition as a result of specifying brand name software maintenance, it was determined that limited competition is viable among resellers of the required brand name software maintenance that are NASA SEWP V GWAC holders. In accordance with FAR 5.301, 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D), and 16.505(a)(4)(iii), the award notice for this action will be synopsized within 14 days of award on the Federal

Business Opportunities Page (FBO) and this justif ication will be made publicly available.

Additionally, in accordance with FAR 16.505(a)(4)(iii)(A)(1), this justif ication shall be posted with the solicitation on the NASA SEWP V GWAC website to notify prospective offerors.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: The Government has continued to conduct market research to ascertain if there were changes in the marketplace that would enable future actions to be competed. Specifically, VA is currently moving towards award of a competitive acquisition for a cloud-based Software as a Service solution that will absorb and replace this requirement. The Government anticipates award of this competitive cloud based solution in mid 4th quarter FY21. Once award is made, Authority to Operate is granted, and all necessary data migration is performed, all future requirements will be handled under the competitive award.

8. Market Research: The Government’s technical experts conducted market research in April 2021 by reviewing other similar brand name eDiscovery software applications, FY21 Veritas eDiscovery VA-21-00063655 specifically products from Relativity and CasePoint, to determine whether any other sources can provide the licenses, software maintenance and support. Based on this review, it was determined that no other source could provide the licenses, software maintenance and support for the Veritas eDiscovery System software as the additional licenses must be compatible with the existing Veritas eDiscovery appliances. Further, these sources lacked access to the proprietary source code necessary to provide the required maintenance support as discussed above. Only Veritas or its resellers can provide the required software maintenance and support for the licenses as only those sources have the ability to access the proprietary code.

On April 22, 2021, additional market research was conducted using the Provider Lookup

Tool on the NASA SEWP V GWAC website. It was determined that there are numerous NASA SEWP V GWAC holders that are resellers of brand name Veritas software products that can provide the required software maintenance and support under North American Industry Classification System code 541519. Therefore, limited competition is anticipated under the NASA SEWP V GWAC for the requirements described herein.

9. Other Facts: None.