FY25 BMC Software JA_FINAL-JB-S.pdf

BMC Software – Software Licenses and Maintenance Control Number: VA-25-00000416

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: This proposed action is for firm-fixed price delivery order to be issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for additional brand name BMC Software (BMC) perpetual software licenses and software maintenance for BMC software licenses currently in use at VA.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The VA Office of Information and Technology

(OIT), Infrastructure Operations (IO), requires maintenance for 110,913 existing brand name BMC software licenses, and an additional 100 licenses and maintenance due to a recent hardware upgrade.

The BMC products provide functions required to support the IO datacenter mainframe computing platform performance management and batch processing. The current IO infrastructure is based on existing BMC software. The software maintenance and updates are necessary to ensure the software remains operational and secure. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure the brand name BMC software licenses managed by IO receive all necessary software upgrades and updates to include major releases, point releases, service releases and security releases on a quarterly basis, and/or within 48 hours when a high-risk vulnerability fix becomes available. These upgrades/patches provide new feature sets, address program errors in prior versions, and provide security enhancements. The software maintenance support shall include 24 hour per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year assistance via phone and email, as well as all software upgrades and patches.

Due to a recent mainframe upgrade (z15 to z16) an additional 100 licenses are required as one of the new z16 mainframes works at an additional 100 million instructions per second (MIPS) capacity.

The period of performance for this action shall be12-months, from October 1, 2024- September 30, 2025, with one (1) 12-month Option Period, to be exercised at the Government’s discretion. The total estimated price of the proposed action including the option period is $4,703,235.90.

4. Statutory Authority: Pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 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 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 8 of this justification, it was determined that limited competition is available for the required brand name BMC perpetual software licenses and software maintenance among authorized BMC resellers. A recent z15 mainframe upgrade to z16 requires an additional 100 licenses, as one of the new z16 mainframes works at an additional 100 MIPS capacity.

Software maintenance is required for software upgrades and patches to VA’s current BMC licenses to ensure they remain operational and secure.

The current IO infrastructure is based on existing BMC Software products and VA requires licenses and maintenance support compatible with the existing infrastructure protocols and functionality to ensure continued operational availability. Only BMC Software, or an authorized reseller, can provide the necessary software updates because of the propriety source code required to develop and implement those software updates. No other software maintenance can provide access to BMC’s proprietary database structures, protocols, software application programming interfaces, or performance capabilities necessary to sufficiently maintain the BMC software and ensure it can handle the vast amounts of data required by VA.

The BMC software already exists widely within IO and VA is not considering replacing the current software system at this time. Replacement of existing software alone would cost an estimated minimum of $30 million. This estimate is based on previous acquisition history and would not be recovered through competition. Additionally, any such deployment of an alternative software solution would require reconfiguration of millions of lines of code across the over 70 applications that currently use BMC. This reconfiguration would be necessary to adjust scripts, or a sequence of instructions, that have been set up to run automatically utilizing the BMC products. If VA utilized an alternative brand software, changes to scripts would be necessary to utilize the new software, and to have that new software provide the required functionality. This reconfiguration process is very labor intensive and would require a minimum of three years to complete. This estimate is based on prior reconfiguration efforts of similar magnitude. Further, while the necessary reconfiguration was being performed, both BMC software and the new software would need to be executing in parallel to ensure data integrity, and thus the maintenance included in this procurement would still be necessary. The cost of running both products simultaneously is estimated to be double the current maintenance costs. These costs would not be recovered through competition. Additionally, training would need to be provided for VA analysts to be able to write code on any alternative software. This would require extensive training to enable staff to duplicate many of the more complex solutions and would incur additional costs in the form of loss of programming manhours as the many of VA BMC software programmers would need to be trained on the new software. Only BMC can provide the necessary software updates because access to the proprietary source code is required to develop and implement software maintenance. Thus, no other source is capable of providing the required software maintenance due to the proprietary nature of the software database structures, protocols, and software application programming interfaces. Therefore, only BMC brand name software and maintenance can meet the Government's requirements.

Failure to procure the required software maintenance on the brand name BMC perpetual software licenses currently in use at VA would cause degradation of VA’s ability to maintain operations. Specifically, this would negatively impact the operation of the BMC software or exploitation of a security vulnerability and would severely impact the operations of VA’s datacenter mainframe and the mission critical applications and data hosted within.

This would have a catastrophic impact on Veterans benefits, VA Employee benefits and VA vendor payments.

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. However, the undersigned VA technical representative determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for brand name BMC Software, software maintenance and support. In accordance with FAR 16.505(a)(4)(iii)(A)(1), this justification will be provided with the solicitation to all appropriate NASA SEWP V GWAC holders. Furthermore, 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 on the Federal Business Opportunities website and this justification will be made publicly available within 14 days of award.

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

8. Market Research: Research for other source/service providers was conducted in

February 2024 by the Government’s technical experts by reviewing other software licenses and maintenance that are similar to the BMC software services being acquired.

Specifically, VA’s technical team conducted web-based research on Symantec and Clarity to determine whether they can provide the required licenses and software maintenance support. The Government’s technical experts concluded that Symantec and Clarity can only provide licenses and services for their proprietary software and that they are not able to provide licenses or maintenance on BMC proprietary software.

Thus, no other alternative can provide access to BMC’s proprietary database structures, protocols, software application programming interfaces, or performance capabilities necessary to sufficiently maintain the BMC software and ensure it can handle the vast amounts of data required by VA. Furthermore, only BMC or one of its authorized re-sellers can provide the additional 100 perpetual licenses required due to the upgrade from z15 to z16 mainframes. The additional licenses would need to be compatible and interoperable with the existing BMC software licenses and BMC infrastructure, which is not possible with any other alternative for the proprietary reasons discussed in Section 5 above. Based on this market research, no other alternative can provide the necessary access to the proprietary platforms required to keep the BMC application’s secure and operational.

Additional market research was performed in July 2024 by utilizing the NASA SEWP V GWAC Provider Lookup tool, which resulted in the identification of six Small Business Administration Certified Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business authorized resellers of the required brand name BMC Software licenses and software maintenance. As a result, there is a reasonable expectation for limited competition on the NASA SEWP V GWAC for the brand name BMC Software licenses and software maintenance.

9. Other Facts: None

10. Technical and Requirements Certification: I certify that the supporting data under my cognizance, which are included in this justification, are accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Dawn D. Sturtz Date:

Program Manager Signature:

11. Fair and Reasonable Cost Determination: I hereby determine that the anticipated price to the Government for this contract action will be fair and reasonable. Contracts awarded on NASA SEWP V GWAC have already been determined to be fair and reasonable. As there are multiple resellers on the NASA SEWP V GWAC capable of providing brand name BMC Software licenses and software maintenance services described herein, price competition is anticipated. Finally, if only one quote is received price analysis shall be conducted by comparing the successful quote to the Independent Government Cost Estimate.

Joseph Jones Date:

Procuring Contracting Officer Signature:

12. Procuring Contracting Officer Certification: I certify that this justification is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Joseph Jones Date:

Procuring Contracting Officer Signature:

Approval

In my role as procuring activity Advocate for Competition, based on the foregoing justification, I hereby approve the acquisition of BMC Software licenses and maintenance services on an other than fair opportunity basis pursuant to the authority cited in Section 4 above, subject to availability of funds, and provided that the services herein described have otherwise been authorized for acquisition.

Jason Bullen Date Advocate for Competition Technology Acquisition Center Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics Department of Veterans Affairs