JA_Brand_Name_Informatica_Redacted.pdf

Informatica Software Maintenance CONTROL NUMBER VA-26-00003100

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 new contract action is for a firm-fixed price (FFP) delivery order (DO) issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for renewal of brand name Informatica PowerCenter Software maintenance and support.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The proposed action is to provide renewal of annual software maintenance support services for VA-owned Informatica licenses, which are currently in use at the VA under Contract Number NNG15SD21B, Order Number 36C10B22F0377, for the Office of Information and Technology (OI&T), Infrastructure Operations for Financial Reporting Data Warehouse (FRDW) and Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Performance Analysis and Integrity (also known as app code VD2) servers located in Austin, Texas. The Informatica PowerCenter software is a VA owned Extract- Transform-Load software tool that is utilized as the backbone for conversion and population of raw data from disparate systems into data tables. The data is used VA-wide for critical financial reporting and analysis, as well as benefits determination and reporting. The required software maintenance consists of software updates, patches, 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 necessary. The software maintenance support is necessary to ensure the software remains fully functional and operational allowing the applications to operate successfully. This action is for software maintenance and support only. The period of performance consists of a 12-month base period, with two 12-month option periods for continued software maintenance renewals, if exercised. The total estimated price of the proposed action is $ inclusive of options.

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 document, it was determined that limited competition is viable among authorized resellers for Informatica software maintenance and support services. Informatica's software is proprietary in nature. Only Informatica and authorized resellers of Informatica products can provide Informatica software maintenance support as only they can access the proprietary source code necessary to provide the required software updates, patches point releases, service releases, and security releases.

Furthermore, Informatica software maintenance is needed to ensure that all software maintenance support performed is properly configured to the Informatica PowerCenter software and can only be provided by those who have access to the proprietary software code. Informatica owns the proprietary rights to the Informatica PowerCenter software and only Informatica or its authorized resellers have the required access to the source code and other proprietary data of the software to be able to meet the Government's needs for software maintenance. Use of any alternative software maintenance would require the replacement of the existing Informatica software in place. In addition to the costs of re-procuring alternative software, any other software would also have to be integrated into all the data transfers, data records, and the entirety of the hundreds of terabytes of existing FRDW and EDW data which would have to be converted to that new software. This includes installing, configuring, converting, rebuilding, testing, disseminating, and validating the new software across all environments of both FRDW and EDW, which currently hold substantial data volumes.

Without properly maintained and operational Informatica PowerCenter software, VA would be unable to convert raw data within FRDW or EDW and unable to access pertinent information and historical data for benefits determination or fiscal year financial reports through the VA Annual Close (VA's annual closeout on financial reporting) and other critical report periods. This failure would jeopardize benefits to Veterans and put VA at risk for audit failure. This cumulative effort is estimated to be at least in duplicative costs and take over two years to fully implement, neither of which would be recovered through competition. These estimates are based on previous acquisition history. Resultingly, Brand name Informatica PowerCenter software maintenance is the only software maintenance product that meets the Government's requirements.

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 Informatica licenses, as well as 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 Contract 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 research from November 2024 to June 2025 on other commercial products including Tibco, Syncsort (Rebranded as Precisely), Sybase Software, Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), Oracle Datawarehouse Builder, Data Stage, and Abinitio. As a result of this market research, the technical experts determined Informatica’s source code is proprietary and cannot be accessed by any other vendor to provide the necessary software maintenance of the VA owned software. Therefore, only Informatica or an

12. Contracting Officer Certification/Approval

I certify that this justification is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Date

Contracting Officer, Procurement Service – C Technology Acquisition Center Office of Procurement, Acquisition and Logistics

Approval

In my role as procuring activity Advocate for Competition, based on the foregoing justification, I hereby approve the acquisition of Informatica Software maintenance and support 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 property and services herein described have otherwise been authorized for acquisition.

Date

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

08/05/2025

08/05/2025