JA 47QTCA18D0081 36C10B24F0185.pdf

Control Number: VA-24-00010933

LIMITED-SOURCES JUSTIFICATION

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics

Technology Acquisition Center 23 Christopher Way Eatontown, New Jersey 07724

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for a 12-month firm-fixed price task order for brand name Statistical Analytical Services (SAS) software licenses and maintenance support. This effort is being conducted under the authority of the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Program; the proposed effort will be awarded under the General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) 47QTCA18D0081 to Executive Information Systems, LLC (EIS, LLC), 6901 Rockledge Drive, Suite 600, Bethesda, Maryland 20817-7836.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The proposed action will provide the VA, Virtual Intelligent Networks for Computing Infrastructures (VINCI) program with continued annual SAS software license renewals and maintenance support services to support the VINCI research program. The SAS software licenses are needed to support the VINCI environment and is a web-based software solution that supports over 1,000 research projects and utilizes 100 terabytes of data daily. The software maintenance support will consist of software upgrades to include major releases, point releases, service releases, and security releases of applicable software on a quarterly basis, and/or within 48 hours in cases in which a high-risk vulnerability fix becomes available. This software maintenance is necessary for Information Operations to be able to operate successfully and is required to ensure the software remains operational. The period of performance for June 30, 2024, through June 29, 2025.

4. Authority: This acquisition is conducted under the authority of the Multiple- Award Schedule Program. The specific authority providing for a limited source award is Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 8.405-6(a)(1)(i)(B), “Only one source is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services are unique or highly specialized.

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: The proposed source for this action is EIS, LLC. Based on market research, as described in Section 8 of this justification, it was determined that there is no competition among vendors for the required software licenses and software maintenance as EIS, LLC is the sole Government provider of SAS software licenses and maintenance support.

SAS’ software is proprietary in nature and is not released to any other party. Only SAS or its authorized reseller, EIS, LLC, have the required access to the source code and other proprietary software data to be able to meet the Government’s needs. SAS software is the only product that can meet VA’s functional requirement to enable VA researchers to analyze and extract meaningful information from extremely large data sets up to five terabytes. Only SAS has the performance and capability for handling the vast amounts of data required by VA and can provide support to ensure that the VA has the required availability and reliability of the current SAS grid. SAS’s solution is the only solution that is compatible with the existing VINCI program platform and business processes. Additionally, even if an alternative software was capable of handling the large data sets required by VA, no alternative software solution is interoperable in VA’s current environment.

Specifically, the deployment of any alternative software would require reconfiguration of millions of lines of code across the over 60 applications that currently use SAS software. This reconfiguration would be necessary to adjust scripts, or a sequence of instructions, that have been set up to run automatically utilizing the SAS 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 functionality VA requires. This reconfiguration process is very labor intensive and is estimated to require a minimum of three years to complete. This estimate is based on previous reconfiguration efforts of similar magnitude. Further, while the necessary reconfiguration was being performed, both SAS and the new software would need to be executing in parallel while the new solution was being configured and integrated.

Additionally, VA requires maintenance support on this software and only SAS, or their authorized reseller can provide these necessary services because access to SAS proprietary source code is required. No other software developer has the intellectual property rights to access or modify the SAS source code, which is required in order to execute the latest version updates, security patches, and troubleshooting support. Only SAS or its reseller can access the proprietary software source code needed to provide the required software maintenance and ensure that the services provided are properly configured. Access to this source code is also required to develop and push updates and upgrades to the existing software. SAS software maintenance will ensure that all support services are performed and properly configured to the VA-owned SAS software which can only be provided by those who have access to the proprietary software code.

Failure to procure the required brand name SAS software licenses and maintenance support would directly and adversely impact the VINCI research program. VA researchers use the SAS grid, resulting in 25 million compute minutes per year and 75,000 jobs performed to support Veteran care. For the operational staff, SAS grid provides 18 million compute minutes and 54,000 jobs per year to support executive leadership. The SAS software licenses, and maintenance support are vital to maintain the SAS installation so that researchers can use the software to query data to improve Veteran care outcomes. Any inability to procure the required SAS solution would cause a significant impact to the research teams and operational staff who require access to the storage and server technologies to securely host suites of medical and clinical research databases integrated from select national data sources. This would have a devastating impact on VA’s ability to continue valuable Veteran-facing research studies and efforts to improve Veteran care.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in the market research section of this document. This effort did not yield any additional sources that can meet the Government’s requirements.

There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 8.405-6(a)(2) the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Contracting 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: The Government’s technical experts conducted web-based market research from January 2024 through February 2024. As part of this market research the Government’s technical experts reviewed similar software and services from other vendors. The Government’s technical experts also conducted web-based, white papers, and trade publications research of other vendors such as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, Oracle, Informatica, and Stata and the R Project for Statistical Computing product catalogs. The Government’s technical experts concluded that while web-based research and operational staff software solutions from alternative manufacturers are available for use, none of those solutions will meet the VA’s functional and technical requirements or avoid the duplication of cost and time as outlined in Section 5 of this justification. Only SAS Institute, Inc., and its authorized reseller, EIS, Inc., have access to the proprietary database, software source code, and structure specific to the requirement to implement the software licenses and provide the maintenance support services required, as other solutions would not be interoperable with the VA’s current infrastructure. SAS software license is the only software that will satisfy the Government’s requirements. SAS’ software is proprietary in nature and is not released to any other party.

9. Other Facts: None.