JA Camunda Pension Automation for VBMS Redacted.pdf

CONTROL NUMBER VA-24-00023239

JUSTIFICATIONFOR 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 delivery order issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for a brand name Camunda Business Process Management (BPM) software license subscription and software maintenance support.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), Compensation and Pension Service, has a requirement for the annual subscription to the Brand name Camunda Business Process Management (BPM) software license and software maintenance support in support of the Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS). The Camunda BPM annual subscription will include the following: pension benefits claims processing, standard Service Level Agreement support, software maintenance support, and remote consulting. The VBMS Corporate System is a mission critical application, which is sponsored by VBA and supports the following business lines: Compensation, Pension and Fiduciary Services. The Camunda BPM tool suite is the orchestration engine, and supporting toolset, that coordinates the processes of VA pension automation and provides solution capabilities for monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting, among other important features. Camunda BPM allows the VA Pension Automation team to use industry standard Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) 2.0 models process flows and Decision Management Notation (DMN) models to define business rules which explain the decisions made during the process flows. The tool allows the development team to integrate a service library of services created on the Benefits Integration Platform (BIP) and Benefits Gateway Services with minimal proprietary setup and software language. The enterprise license provides key capabilities that will deliver on requirements established by the business for a “Command Center” function and will allow for continuity of operations and expedited troubleshooting and triage of production issues. The software maintenance support included with Camunda BPM provides the following support:

around the clock customer support for any software issues that may arise and consultant services which include training, technical reviews, best practice workshops, and onsite services (upgrading implementations). The period of performance shall be one (1) 12-month base period with one (1) 12-month option period. The total estimated value of the proposed action inclusive of the option periods is XXXXXXXX

4. Statutory Authority: The statutory authority permitting an exception to fair opportunity is Section 41 U.S.C. 4106(c)(2) as implemented by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B), entitled “Only one awardee is capable of providing the

Camunda Pension Automation BPM License Subscription Control Number VA-24-00023239 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, VA has determined that limited competition is available among resellers of the required brand name Camunda BPM software license and software maintenance support. The Camunda BPM tool suite is an orchestration engine software that allows the Pension Automation team to define business rules which define the decisions made during the process flows. The development team does not have to write software code to orchestrate the process; only the business rules that define how the process is executed and the service integration for interaction with all relevant external services. Camunda integrates seamlessly with the BIP tech stack and Blue Framework, including Java, Rest and Oracle. The enterprise license provides key capabilities that will deliver on requirements established by the business for a “Command Center” function and will allow for continuity of operations and expedited troubleshooting and triage of production issues by the operations team.

There is no alternative brand to provide the subscription for the Camunda BPM software licenses and software maintenance support. Only Camunda Inc. can provide the services because any other source would need access to Camunda Inc. proprietary technical data. The acquisition of a different BPM product would require VA to put multiple contracts in place, as no other product meets all of VA’s requirements for this effort. Based on market research described in paragraph 8, no single alternative solution is able to meet all of VA’s requirements. The compatibility and interoperability issues of acquiring multiple different software solutions would prove nearly insurmountable and impractical from a technical and operational standpoint. This would require VA to purchase various software packages from different vendors to accommodate what currently exists within Camunda BMP. Furthermore, the cost of purchasing the various functionalities from multiple vendors would not be cost effective to VA, based on historical pricing for the functionalities when purchased separately. Not only would acquiring a different software be costly to the Government, it would also result in administering multiple contracts at once. The brand name Camunda BPM software and maintenance is the only product that meets the Government’s requirements.

Without renewal of the Camunda BPM software license subscription, VA’s Compensation, Pension and Fiduciary Services system would lose its key capabilities to deliver requirements established by the business for a “Command Center” function, continuity of operations and affect the ability of expedited troubleshooting and triage of production issues by the operations team.

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 Camunda 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 market place that would enable future actions to be competed.

8. Market Research: The Government’s technical experts conducted market research during January 2024 by reviewing similar commercial off-the-shelf software.

Specifically, the Government’s technical experts conducted web-based research and discovered alternative vendors: Pega BPM for Healthcare, Bizflow BPM Suite, Red Hat Process Automation Manager, Living Systems Process Suite, IBM BPM, and Kofax Total Agility. While these vendors may offer similar capabilities, the software they offer will not integrate with Camunda BPM tool suite currently utilized by VBA. Emphasis was placed on open source tools in order to adopt immediately without any delay in procurement timeline, so that the shortened target deadlines imposed for pension automation could be met, while also having confidence in a broad user community support base. Specifically, the following factors are required: Integration level with BIP tech stack and platform constraints; Industry standard adoption for BPMN v2.0 and DMN v1.3; and Command Center function.

The Government’s technical experts determined that the closest open-source alternative identified that met the most requirements, including modeling via BPMN and DMN standards, was Red Hat Process Automation Manager. However, Red Hat does not integrate seamlessly into VA’s current platform (environment) tech stack. It would require additional code to be written and tested and licensing to incorporate the Red Hat Process Automation Manager into VA’s current environment, which would result in additional time and cost to the Government. It also requires OpenShift as a "cloud-native" platform to deploy containers for the application, which results in acquiring a separate software license. BIP recently divested from OpenShift due to licensing expense of that solution.

The Camunda BPM is wholly owned and licensed by Camunda and is considered proprietary, and no other type of software will provide the functionality and maintenance requirement. After comparing other viable software packages, it was determined the only software that met VA’s requirements listed above was Camunda BPM. There are no plans to replace the current approved information technology architecture for Pension Automation Program.

Additional market research was conducted in January 2024 by utilizing the NASA SEWP V GWAC Provider Look-up Tool to determine whether the required Camunda products are available from NASA SEWP V GWAC resellers. The Government’s technical experts identified multiple service-disabled Veteran-owned small business vendors on the NASA SEWP V GWAC that Camunda recently authorized to resell their products.

Finally, NASA SEWP is a dynamic GWAC in which products can be added to vendor catalogs based on customer requests on a daily basis; so long as the required IT product is within scope of the NASA SEWP V GWAC. The requirement discussed herein has been found to be within scope of the NASA SEWP V GWAC in a separate determination.

9. Other Facts: None.