JA - ControlUp Final Redacted.pdf

ControlUp Software Licenses and Support Control Number VA-25-00041892

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, New Jersey 07724

2. Description of Action: This 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 Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for brand name ControlUp Technologies, LTD (ControlUp), ControlUp On- Premises (Ultimate edition) software licenses, associated maintenance including technical support inclusive of ControlUp Academy virtual training, onboarding, and up to 20 hours of professional services.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The VA Office of Information & Technology, Service Management and Planning/Infrastructure Operations requires the renewal of 30,000 ControlUp On-Premises (Ultimate) licenses which will transition to ControlUp ONE Software as Service (SaaS) platform licenses once ControlUp achieves Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) authorization for the ControlUp ONE platform along with associated maintenance. VA also requires unlimited seats for ControlUp Academy virtual training, and premium support that provides among other items direct support for feature and enhancement requests, facilitates training, and will include assistance migrating to the ControlUp One SaaS environment once FedRAMP is achieved. The software maintenance support includes downloads, upgrades, troubleshooting, and 24/7/365 technical support. The VA requires a solution that is interoperable with VA’s existing virtual infrastructure and can support/integrate with all the VA’s EUC solutions out of the box such as Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and W365, Omnissa Horizons, and Citrix Virtual Desktops and Applications (CVAD). ControlUp software is used to monitor, administer, and automate Citrix and other End User Computing (EUC) applications within VA.

VA requires capability of enabling traffic visibility; inclusive of management software, which is based on user application flow statistics in measuring and determining latency on the client side, network side, and application side of the connection. In addition to the above, the VA requires parsing ability for proxy server sessions to assist in troubleshooting, network analysis, and end-to-end performance for Virtual Apps and Desktop sessions to include historical data. Additionally, the VA requires the ability to provide data to an Application Delivery Management system for real-time client and network latency metrics, historical reports, end-to-end performance data and troubleshooting to ensure that individual server software or hardware failures do not negatively impact user access to EUC solutions from inside or outside the VA network.

ControlUp Software Licenses and Support Control Number: VA-25-00041892

The ControlUp licensing shall support VA’s 20,000 EUC concurrent user base, as well as up to 10,000 infrastructure systems. ControlUp shall provide VA the capability to monitor, efficiently operate and troubleshoot, and self-heal all available VA virtual desktop and application solutions. The maintenance support shall include 24x7 software support and maintenance is required. ControlUp Academy virtual training shall provide unlimited seats to ControlUp Academy with live instructor led virtual training options for staff that are across all United States time zones. The premium support provides among other items direct support for feature and enhancement requests, facilitates training, and will include assistance migrating to the ControlUp One SaaS environment once FedRAMP is achieved.

The period of performance shall consist of one 12-month base period and two 12-month option years for the renewal of ControlUp products and services. The total estimated price of the proposed action is , inclusive of all option periods.

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 has been determined that limited competition is available among resellers for the required brand name ControlUp software licenses, maintenance including technical support, training and ControlUp professional services.

Only brand name ControlUp items and services meet all of VA’s requirements, specifically it’s real time metric collection, compatibility, and interoperability with VA’s existing virtual infrastructure.

The ControlUp software licenses provide the critical monitoring functionality necessary for application and desktop virtualization currently being utilized in support of VA’s datacenter consolidation efforts. Use of any other brand software or hardware would result in serious interoperability and compatibility issues with the current infrastructure and cause significant delays as those products are customized to work within the VA’s enterprise environment. Specifically, VA’s current EUC environment comprised of Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, AWS AppStream, and Citrix software and hardware needs to be monitored from the onset without substantial customization. ControlUp provides administrators the ability to manage and monitor multiple Citrix sites from a single pane, limiting the complexity of having to switch between different sites to monitor systems.

No other EUC monitoring solution can support/integrate with all the VA’s EUC solutions out of the box- Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and W365, Omnissa Horizons, Citrix Virtual Desktops and Applications (CVAD). ControlUp also has out of the box integration with ServiceNow, VMware, Nutanix, IGEL, Azure, and Amazon Web

Services (AWS). All other current EUC monitoring solutions either support only a single EUC/Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution, or require significant customization for integration in the VA virtual infrastructure. If another brand name software was to be utilized, it would require significant development and customization with an estimated cost of over $840,000, in addition to costs for changing coding on other software for interoperability, which are unable to be estimated at this time, and which would not be recovered through competition. In addition to the duplicative cost stated, the Government estimates that an alternative to ControlUp well would take up to 24 months to design, implement, test, and gain authority to operate; in addition to time for the solicitation and award, before it would be available to support production user load.

Furthermore, due to ControlUp’s patents, copyrights, proprietary database structures, and proprietary software application programming interfaces, no other source is able to provide the software maintenance and technical support, training or migration services required for maintaining mission critical remote access systems such as Citrix, Amazon AppStream, and Azure Virtual desktop.

Failure to procure ControlUp software licenses, maintenance inclusive of technical support, and ControlUp professional services would result in critical deficiencies in monitoring and administration of the VA’s EUC environments. For many Veterans Service Organizations this is their only means of accessing VA data sources and services in direct support of Veterans. The EUC environments are used for every aspect of VA operations from direct patient care to fiduciary responsibilities. A lack of monitoring, and administrative inefficiencies will contribute to service interruptions and outages and a significant loss in productivity, which would directly impact Veteran care.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in the market research section 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 among authorized ControlUp resellers is available for this brand name acquisition. 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 Contracting Opportunities website and this justification will be made publicly available within 14 days of award.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: In order to remove or overcome barriers to competition in future acquisitions for this requirement, the Government will continue to perform market research to determine if there are any new products or maintenance services available in the marketplace that would enable future actions to be fully competed. As a part of these continuing efforts, the Government intends to submit a Request for Information (RFI) to industry in the next fiscal year stating the Governments requirements at that time and requesting interested vendors response and input. The intent is to have the RFI identify potential alternative products, help define what specific customizations or changes to the requirement would be needed for alternative solutions, and the timelines for implementation to support a future competitive acquisition. In addition, based on the results of the RFI the Government may seek follow on technical demonstrations or vendor meetings.

8. Market Research: The VA performs annual reviews of market offerings for EUC monitoring solutions to ensure that when fair competition is available the government avails itself to it. Between October 2024 and December 2024, the Government technical experts reviewed similar software and technical support by assessing current enterprise capabilities and market research and determined that no other products or services would be fully compatible or interoperable with VA’s existing EUC environment consisting of Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop, AWS AppStream, and Citrix software and hardware. The software reviewed by the Government technical experts included Dynatrace, Login Enterprise, Liquidware, all of which provide similar capabilities, however, none of these solutions are compatible or interoperable with the existing VA infrastructure without substantial duplication of time and costs as described above.

ControlUp integrates natively with software and associated hardware currently being used by VA throughout the EUC infrastructure. Given that only ControlUp has the native integration, there are no other products that can provide the software or associated maintenance, training, professional services required by the Government. Only ControlUp, or a reseller, has the right to provide ControlUp licenses, maintenance, training and professional services.

Additional market research was conducted by the Government on February 2025, to ascertain the extent of limited competition among resellers of the required brand name ControlUp software licenses, maintenance inclusive technical support, and ControlUp professional services, wherein the Contract Specialist utilized the Provider Lookup tool on the NASA SEWP website. The research shows that there are several contract holders identified as resellers of brand name ControlUp such that limited competition is anticipated.

9. Other Facts: None.