JA_For_Sole_Source_to_IBM-BOR_BARS-Redacted_1.pdf

United States Department of the Interior

INTERIOR BUSINESS CENTER

Washington, DC 20240

JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

AUTHORITY: FAR 16.505(b)(2)

SOLICITATION #: TBD

1. Identification of the agency and the contracting activity, and specific identification of the document as a “Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity.”

This document is a Justification for an Exception to Fair Opportunity for the Department of the Interior (DOI), Interior Business Center (IBC), Acquisition Services Directorate (AQD), Division One Branch Two (D1B2), on behalf of the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR).

2. Nature and/or description of the action being approved.

a. The objective of this requirement is to provision BOR with continuing services for operations and maintenance of the Budget and Reporting System (BARS) pending the recompete of a follow-on task order to Task Order 140D0421F0043. AQD intends to award a sole source, Firm-Fixed-Price (FFP) Task Order to IBM Corporation in accordance with the terms and conditions of their Foundation Cloud Hosting Services (FCHS) Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to provide operations and maintenance and hosting services to provide for the continuation of the Phase II implementation of BARS. Services to be included in the sole-source task order include the IBM’s commercial Cognos TM1 Software as a Service (SaaS) that has been tailored to meet the specific requirements of BARS as well as the operation and maintenance of the same. FCHS is DOI’s mandatory source for Cloud Hosting Services and IBM is the only company authorized to perform operation, maintenance, or development of the BARS licenses.

Also included are monthly operations and maintenance support, including but not limited to:

Soft Layer BARS Application Hosting, and Planning Analytics Licenses.

Software to support a total of 30 users with 25 concurrent users. The thirty users include three modelers and 27 users based on the proposed licensing.

Current delivery requirements from DOI BOR to maintain the BARS application in a cloud-hosted environment with additional application-specific development support provided as needed.

The ability for BOR authorized users to add, modify, and delete content and files.

b. The Government intends to award a base period of 12 months and one 12 month option period at an overall estimated total estimated dollar value for this action is

c. Identification of the limited source to be solicited:

IBM Corporation 6710 Rockledge Drive Bethesda, MD 20817-1826

SOLICITATION #: 140D0422Q0509

3. Identification of the exception to fair opportunity (see 16.505(b)(2)(B) and the supporting rationale, including a demonstration that the proposed contractor’s unique qualifications or the nature of the acquisition requires use of the exception cited.

FAR 16.505(b)(2)(B) – 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.

Although BOR owns the IBM-developed and maintained licenses, the sole source task order is predicated on IBM’s status as the singular current source of maintenance of the licenses BOR needs to continue operation of BARS through the additional year. This is critical, based on the fact that BARS has recently gone live (on October 1, 2020), and needs to be supported with minimal disruption in its second complete year of operation. There was insufficient time to conduct a competition for long-term hosting between the go-live date and the end of the current order on 6/4/2022. To pursue another solution at this time, for the sake of fair opportunity, would result in the duplication of costs to the Government to redesign the software to meet the BARS requirement And transition to any other hosting service would still require IBM to provide O&M support as the sole proprietor of the licenses that BOR has purchased.

4. A determination by the contracting officer that the anticipated cost to the Government will be fair and reasonable.

The Contracting Officer (CO) determines that the anticipated price will be fair and reasonable based on the originally assessed price analysis that was conducted at award. Adequate price competition established price reasonableness. This original contract was considered to be competitive, as two offerors made it to the best and final offer stage in a full and open competitive environment.

Adequate competition was achieved. The Government’s price analysis examined and evaluated pricing without looking at the individual cost elements of each vendor’s price. This analysis included a comparison of the competitive price proposals received with the Government estimate.

5. Any other facts supporting the justification.

It took longer than anticipated to complete work on the prior development phases of BARS, due to unforeseen circumstances. As a result, BARS has only recently gone live, optimally operating virtually all of its planned capabilities on October 1, 2020. As a result, interrupting and/or changing the provider of operations and maintenance services so soon after this would be prohibitively ineffective.

6. A statement of the actions, if any, the agency may take to remove or overcome any barriers that led to the exception to fair opportunity before any subsequent acquisition for the supplies or services is made.

After conclusion of award, DOI will compete a longer-term solution. The requirement will be competed to the maximum extent practical. Current plan is to update Statement of Work for a Day- One Use-Case for the Foundation Cloud Hosting Services contracts re-compete.