JA IBM DataStage VA final Redacted_Redacted.pdf

VA-26-00011694

JA - FAR Part 16.5

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: This proposed action is for a firm fixed-price delivery order to be issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for the acquisition of software maintenance and support for existing VA-owned perpetual brand name International Business Machines (IBM) DataStage Enterprise Cartridge for IBM Cloud Pak, InfoSphere DataStage and QualityStage Designer (IBM DataStage) licenses.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Information and Technology (OIT) has a requirement to procure software maintenance and support for existing perpetual brand name IBM DataStage licenses for the Community Care Product Line (CCPL). The VA-owned perpetual licenses were previously procured through numerous contract actions in support of multiple CCPL products. As a result, the renewal timeframe varies, resulting in the need to accommodate the software maintenance and support accordingly. This software provides data extract, transfer, load (ETL) functionality crucial to the continued development and sustainment of VA’s software architecture.

This product allows VA software applications to be compliant with the VA Enterprise Architecture by employing standardized Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) business transaction data models, simplifying the process of data migration and maintenance, and ensuring product reusability if VA software technologies change over time. In addition, IBM InfoSphere allows for deployment of the IBM Information Server product as well as enabling the use of the QualityStage product. IBM Information Server acts as a configurable controller layer to the application server, for the IBM DataStage application. IBM QualityStage applies data governance to ETL tasks established in the IBM DataStage product. This is critical to ensure VA has tooling to perform automated testing of data maps and translation tasks.

The existing IBM Passport Advantage Service Account will be sustained for VA and will continue to provide VA access to IBM’s support portal, knowledge management portal, telephone support access privileges, and media and license download access as standard entitlements. The Contractor shall provide all software maintenance services, technical support, media, documentation, and information sharing support through IBM Passport Advantage account access. All perpetual IBM DataStage licenses in use by products within the OIT Health CCPL at the time of purchase and under active maintenance agreement shall be serviceable through access to the IBM Passport Advantage online services. Support is provided utilizing the IBM customer Passport Advantage and Problem Management Request (PMR) websites and through a toll-free

Maintenance and Support of IBM DataStage VA-26-00011694 customer support phone number. Access to support services will be controlled by VA’s Technical Representative who will be assigned the role as named IBM Primary Customer Account designee for the products and services provided by this contract.

Such services shall include periodic updates, enhancements and corrections to the software, and 24x7 technical support to ensure that the software performs according to its specifications, documentation or demonstrated claims.

The period of performance shall be 12 months to support the various renewal dates needed for maintenance and support of the VA-owned

4. Statutory Authority: Pursuant to Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Subpart 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 extensive market research, as described in paragraph 8 of this document, it was determined that limited competition is viable among authorized resellers for the software maintenance and support of existing VA-owned perpetual brand name IBM DataStage licenses. Only IBM’s DataStage meets all of the Government’s functional requirements. The VA-owned IBM DataStage licenses are the only software that can continue to build upon VA’s existing IBM base systems and the proprietary data repositories that contain critical VA data ETL mappings and processes. The software creates a unique data repository within each VA-built software application dependent upon data management and migration capability. The repository is used in real-time by the VA application in order to execute the application. Compatibility to existing vendor proprietary repositories, which are called upon on demand during execution of critical VA applications, is required. No other brand name item is compatible or interoperable with the existing repositories. This is because all the existing repositories that store various business data ETL rules were created through IBM proprietary technical data and can only be accessible and functional through brand name IBM software. No source other than IBM and its authorized resellers have access to the proprietary data and source code necessary to provide the required patching and version upgrades/enhancements and security updates for the IBM DataStage licenses currently deployed. Due to these proprietary constraints, the use of any other alternative software maintenance and support would necessitate a complete replacement of the IBM DataStage infrastructure in place.

Specifically, acquiring a different data ETL tool other than IBM DataStage software would involve the reprocurement of existing software licenses. Based on previous acquisition history, this would cause VA to incur duplicative costs, estimated at a minimum of $5,761,600, that cannot be recovered through competition. Additionally, any such replacement would also require an extensive development effort, inclusive in the estimated cost above. Specifically, this development effort would include a complete re-engineering of existing repositories as well as VA application interfaces to the repositories, the development and requirements management processes for managing the repositories, and the role-based access to the tools. Re-engineering of existing repositories and repositories to be changed would be a major revision to VA custom-built applications. VA estimates that this effort would take a minimum of 24 months to accomplish, during which time VA would also need to maintain its existing IBM DataStage licenses and functionality. This estimate of time is based on previous development efforts of similar size and scope.

Replacement of a data ETL migration product impacts both VA applications being prepared for production as well as VA products in production. These tools are used by both development efforts and during run time of VA product execution. Replacing this product brand would not just impact the development methods of the product, but also all VA applications that are dependent upon its production use such as the Community Care Reimbursement System (CCRS) and the Program Integrity Tool (PIT) products.

The VA applications dependent upon this acquisition perform critical duties such as Community Care Network (CCN) Third Party Administrator (TPA) healthcare reimbursements, third-party billing systems, and other financial and patient administrative determinations including Fraud Waste and Abuse (FWA). The PIT system just remediated a critical issue resulting in a lengthy outage for its business critical function over the past 2 years and would require extensive rework in order to compensate for a change in their lower-tier layer of data governance and ETL if required to replace this toolset and the VA applications’ business rules repositories.

The CCPL uses IBM DataStage to automate processing of CCN healthcare claims processing. The CCRS system receives several records of healthcare claims and during the initial loading process, CCRS utilizes the IBM DataStage to rapidly ingest, extract, transfer, and load claims data into their data stores with the goal of meeting or exceeding their needs to ingest nearly 5 million claims per month. The IBM DataStage application entered production state in CCRS via release in November of 2017. From the initial date of deployment to today, the application has ramped up claims automated processing such that the system receives 4 million claim data sets per month on average. IBM DataStage delivers additional capabilities for the CCRS product including visualizing data ETL metrics and reporting; performing quality assurance on data translation and transfer routines; and data analytics and modelling capabilities.

Eliminating or migration of the content of the repositories and discontinuing of the use of the IBM DataStage software to perform data ingest during VA application execution would require major re-engineering efforts that would seriously jeopardize VA’s architecture and required deliveries of new functionality and system improvements for multiple high-profile, high-risk, and high-budget program initiatives such as the CCPL. New and existing Veteran healthcare reimbursement for healthcare provided in the community would all be impacted if errors resulted from the change in middle tier technology. Critical financial systems would be impacted by the efforts to re-platform the middle tier due to the complexity and comprehensive series of system-to-system interfaces that exist between VA applications and systems. Only IBM or authorized resellers can provide the necessary software, maintenance and updates because of the proprietary source code required to develop and implement software updates. This code is also needed to ensure all services provided are properly configured. Therefore, this continued software maintenance and support is required to maintain the integrity and security of the existing VA-owned brand name IBM DataStage licenses.

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, it was determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for brand name IBM DataStage 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 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 the requirements described herein, 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 conducted market research by conducting web-based searches and reviewing other similar software from April thru November 2025.

Specifically, the Government conducted web-based research on vendor websites. The other similar software reviewed included Talend (ETL product), Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glue, and TIBCO. Based on reviews of these products, the Government determined that none of these products provide the ability to rapidly extract, transfer, and load data from existing repositories. Based on all of these market research efforts, the Government has determined that only brand name IBM software can meet all of VA’s needs. No source other than IBM and its authorized resellers have access to the proprietary data and source code necessary to provide the required patching and version upgrades/enhancements and security updates for the IBM DataStage licenses currently deployed. As such, the Government determined that only IBM and its resellers can provide the required software maintenance and support for existing VA-owned brand name IBM DataStage licenses without the duplicative costs and time, as noted above in Section 5 of this justification.

Additional market research was conducted in January 2026 by the Contract Specialist utilizing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) provider lookup to identify prospective GWAC resellers of the brand name IBM products. It was determined that there are multiple authorized resellers, including multiple SDVOSB resellers, of brand name IBM software products and offerings that hold current GWACs. Therefore, limited competition is expected among SDVOSBs for this proposed action.

9. Other Facts: N/A