J_A_Redacted.pdf

Control Number VA-26-00053229

LIMITED-SOURCES JUSTIFICATION

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 to award a firm-fixed-price task order for brand name Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) software maintenance and support, for all VA-owned SAS perpetual licenses across multiple program offices and platforms. This order is a consolidation that will replace eight (8) program-specific renewals with a single enterprise task order under GSA MAS Contract 47QTCA18D0081 to Executive Information Systems, LLC (EIS), the sole authorized reseller for SAS analytics software renewal, software and maintenance support for existing perpetual licenses.

3. Description of Supplies or Services: The VA Information Technology Operations and Service End User Operations (EUO), has a requirement for the renewal of brand name SAS software annual maintenance and support. The consolidated order multiple VA programs offices. SAS software provides an integrated environment for predictive and descriptive analytics, including data mining, text analytics, forecasting, optimization, simulation, visualization, and statistical modeling. These capabilities are essential for research, clinical operations, business intelligence, and largescale data analysis across the VA. Annual software maintenance ensures continued access to technical support and online self-help resources, software updates, including major releases, point releases, service packs, and security patches delivered quarterly or within 48 hours for high-risk vulnerabilities, and enhancements that maintain compatibility, security, and performance of mission critical analytics platforms. This consolidated maintenance renewal supports multiple VA organizations relying on existing perpetual SAS licenses for ongoing operations.

For instance, Infrastructure Operations (IO) requires renewal of brand name SAS

Informatics System for Integrative Science (GenISIS) - a mission critical analytics and research platform used to process, analyze, and interpret largescale genomic datasets. SAS provides advanced analytics, high volume data processing, and visualization capabilities needed to detect genomic anomalies, identify data trends, and support precision medicin features, including sophisticated statistical modeling, analytical style graphs, mapping capabilities, and interactive visualizations enable GenISIS users to extract actionable insights from massive genomic datasets. These tools are vital for supporting VA biomedical and genomic research, where timely interpretation of complex relationships directly informs scientific findings and operational decisions.

Maintenance ensures ongoing operational integrity of the GenISIS platform.

SAS Software Maintenance Control Number VA-26-00053229

The required period of performance will consist of a 12-month base period, including optional tasks, and two (2) 12-month option periods. The total estimated value including all options and optional tasks is .

4. Statutory Authority: This acquisition is conducted under the authority of the Multiple-Award Schedule Program. The specific authority providing for a limited source award is Revolutionary Federal Acquisition Regulation (RFO) Overhaul VA Deviation 8.401(b) and General Services Acquisition Manual/Regulation (GSAM/R) 538.7104-or solution required at the level of quality required because the products, services or

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: The proposed source for this requirement is Executive Information Systems, LLC (EIS), 6901 Rockledge Drive, Suite 600, Bethesda, Maryland 20817. Based on comprehensive market research described in Section 8 of this justification, EIS is the exclusive Government authorized reseller of SAS software products and associated maintenance for Version 9.4 and later. All SAS maintenance, patches, and technical support are provided directly by SAS Institute exclusively through EIS for Federal customers.

The VA currently owns perpetual SAS licenses that are essential to ongoing operations across multiple organizational elements. Although VA holds these licenses, annual maintenance is required to ensure access to vendor-provided software updates, security patches, and technical troubleshooting. SAS software is proprietary, and no other entity besides SAS Institute, through its authorized reseller EIS, has access to the underlying proprietary source code, update mechanisms, or diagnostic interfaces necessary to maintain or repair the software. As a result, only SAS Institute/EIS can legally and technically provide the required software maintenance services.

The SAS analytical environment used within the VA consists of major enterprise workloads, VA administrative data repositories, and a broad ecosystem of research and operational applications supported by the EUO. SAS is the sole analytics platform ful formats, schema definitions, and proprietary macros have been deeply integrated into VA systems for more than a decade. No alternative commercial product has the capability to read, process, or maintain these datasets without translation or conversion, which cannot be performed without significant data corruption risk.

Attempts to use any non-SAS software to access SAS datasets would result in inoperability, inconsistent outputs, data loss, or complete failure of analytics operations.

store decades of Veteran demographic, clinical, and administrative data. These datasets are critical for trend analysis, cohort identification, monitoring of healthcare outcomes, fraud detection, quality improvement initiatives, and other mission critical functions. Without annual SAS maintenance, the VA would lose the ability to access, analyze, or generate these data outputs. Mission areas affected would include patient safety and outcomes analytics, CSP clinical trials, National research studies, enterprise reporting for VA leadership, fraud, waste, and abuse detection, resource planning and forecasting, data quality governance, and administrative analytics support for VHA and VBA.

Without proper SAS maintenance, software updates, including required cybersecurity patches, could not be applied. This would expose VA data systems to vulnerabilities, violate security compliance standards, and increase the likelihood of data integrity issues. Additionally, SAS-dependent applications would degrade over time as operating systems and platforms evolve without corresponding SAS issued compatibility updates. VA estimates that more than 3,000 users rely daily on SAS for statistical analysis, data manipulation, and enterprise-wide reporting. SAS supports complex workflows, many of which are automated through proprietary SAS scripts and scheduled jobs. Failure to renew maintenance would jeopardize these automated processes and disrupt mission-critical data pipelines.

maintenance with a product other than SAS would require VA to procure new analytical software. Procuring another product would involve a substantial duplication of cost (e.g. solutioning of requirements, research for alternative software, proof of concept, procurement costs, installation, testing, migration, new licenses, maintenance, etc.) that is not expected to be recovered through competition. Additionally, the time it would take to install, test to ensure compatibility with the current servers and train VA staff on the use of new software would cause unacceptable project delays. Based on previous migration efforts of similar scale, this transition would require a minimum of three years. During this period, both SAS and the replacement product would need to operate in parallel to ensure data integrity, doubling operational costs. The estimated expense for redevelopment, testing, deployment, and training exceeds $4 million and would likely be significantly higher when accounting for productivity loss, delays to ongoing studies, and system downtime. These costs would not be recouped through competition and would introduce unacceptable operational risk. Furthermore, alternative software solutions would require the installation of a new, fully separate technical infrastructure. This would necessitate downtime and interrupt critical systems needed for patient care analytics, national research efforts, and ongoing operational decision making. Such outages are unacceptable and would materially impact VA operations.

analytical ecosystem, the scale of data involved, and the mission-critical nature of supported operations, brand-name SAS maintenance provided exclusively via EIS is the only solution capable of meeting VA requirements. Any lapse in SAS maintenance support would jeopardize the functioning of high visibility business intelligence platforms, disrupt clinical and administrative operations, and impair the

-driven decision-making.

EIS holds a current contract under the GSA MAS Contract 47QTCA18D0081 and is vendor possesses the legal authority, technical capability, proprietary access, or interoperability

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in Section 8 of this justification. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. Based on market research EIS is the only authorized Government reseller of SAS software. In accordance with RFO 5.301 and GSAM/R 538.7104- 3(b)(3) the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Contracting Opportunities website and this justification will be made publicly available for a minimum of 30 days.

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 completed. Specifically, the Government will continue to monitor the marketplace to determine whether other brands of software could

8. Market Research: Market research was conducted during February 2026 through March 2026 through a series of technical assessments, web-based evaluations, and technical experts examined a broad range of statistical and analytical tools, including IBM SPSS, R, Stata, Anaconda, WPS Analytics, and Sisense, as well as industry analyses from Forrester and Gartner and various technical mainframe resources.

The purpose of this review was to determine whether any alternative products or vendors could meet the Government maintenance requirements for its existing SAS software environment. The Government maintains numerous mission-critical databases, particularly research and health related datasets, that are written entirely in SAS proprietary code. These confirmed that competing statistical software products lack the ability to interpret or modify SAS proprietary code, making them incompatible with VA's existing data assets. Although many of the evaluated products offer standalone analytic capabilities, none are capable of supporting, maintaining, or updating SAS-based driven workflows.

Additionally, while products such as SPSS and Stata offer vendor-specific maintenance, such support does not, and cannot, extend to SAS licenses due to the proprietary nature of SAS source code. Only SAS Institute (and EIS as the sole reseller) holds the legal and technical ability to issue software updates, security patches, and product fixes required to maintain full functionality and compliance for solution can meet core Government requirements without requiring a complete existing SAS based infrastructure.

Further market research conducted including reviews of Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts such as NASA SEWP V and GSA. This review sought to identify whether any authorized resellers beyond EIS could provide SAS licenses and associated maintenance. No such resellers were identified. Additionally, the Government engaged in direct communications with SAS representatives in October 2025. SAS Institute confirmed that it conducts business with the Federal Government solely through its designated small business reseller, EIS. SAS reaffirmed that EIS holds exclusive rights to sell and support SAS software licenses, including perpetual license maintenance and SAS versions 9.4 and later maintenance, to federal customers. No other vendor is authorized to provide updates, patches, or technical support for SAS products within the Federal Government.

authorized Federal reseller, there is no reasonable expectation of competition.

Therefore, the Government has determined that Executive Information Systems, LLC, is the only source capable of providing the required SAS software licenses and associated maintenance. This requirement will be fulfilled through a sole source task order issued to EIS under GSA MAS contract number 47QTCA18D0081.

9. Other Facts: None.