JA Riverbed Maintenance and Technical Support.pdf

Riverbed Maintenance and Technical Support Control Number: VA-20-00089863

JUSTIFICATION

FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center 1701 Directors Blvd

Austin, TX 78744

2. Description of Action: The 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 brand name Riverbed Technology, Inc. (Riverbed) hardware and software maintenance and technical support.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: VA, Office of Information Technology (OI&T), Information Technology Operations and Services (ITOPS) has a requirement for the renewal of annual brand name Riverbed hardware and software maintenance and associated technical support for sustainment of its Enterprise Wide Area Network (WAN) Acceleration and Application and Network performance monitoring infrastructure. The WAN infrastructure is comprised of Riverbed hardware and software, which sustains the One-VA Network of applications necessary for day-to-day functionality while allowing the VA to maximize its current network resources and

-increasing business needs by ensuring sufficient capacity and compression of increasing data for transfer.

continue to grow year to year due to resource centralization, and increased demand by network users and network-based applications. Continued support of the WAN acceleration infrastructure will provide a more robust, optimized, and fault tolerant enterprise network that supports many IT projects and technologies that directly provide and improve Veteran services.

Renewal of maintenance and technical support Riverbed WAN acceleration and Application and Network performance monitoring.

Maintenance support shall be Gold Level Support and include next business day hardware replacement, software updates, patches, firmware updates, and 24x7 access to phone, email, and web support. Technical support includes designated points-of-contact into Riverbed with expert knowledge of Riverbed technologies, and access to proprietary knowledge and Riverbed development resources. This proposed action is for maintenance and technical support services only. The period of performance will be 12 months. The order will also include optional line items for increased quantities of maintenance for various Riverbed products. The total estimated price of the proposed action, including optional line items, is

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 the FAR providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: Based on market research, as further described in Section 8 of this justification, VA has determined that limited competition is available among Riverbed resellers. The current Enterprise WAN Acceleration is based in a Riverbed infrastructure, which are proprietary products.

Riverbed hardware and software maintenance hardware firmware coding as well as the coding that runs through the hardware is proprietary in nature and is not released to any other party. Additionally, Riverbed owns the proprietary rights to Riverbed software and only Riverbed have the required access to the source code and other proprietary data of the software. Therefore, no other maintenance provider has the proprietary code to perform the required hardware and software maintenance support. Without this source code, a non-Riverbed maintenance provider would not have access to proprietary Riverbed code which is necessary in order to push patches and updates for all deployed software and firmware running on the hardware required and ensure the Riverbed infrastructure is properly configured and operational. Therefore, Riverbed hardware and software maintenance is the only

Additionally, only Riverbed technical support will have access to the proprietary source code of the Riverbed infrastructure, in which VA relies on in driving product features and security enhancements to Riverbed deployment. Riverbed technical support provides access to proprietary internal business intelligence, knowledge, and data that are not shared outside of Riverbed. Only Riverbed can provide rapid escalation and resolution for issues that are impacting mission critical operations due internal corporate access to Riverbed engineering and development resources, which requires access to proprietary internal Riverbed information. This access is also necessary to provide the VA timely remediation to functional and security issues with Riverbed technologies.

Failure to renew Riverbed maintenance and technical support would result in a loss of ability to receive items such as hardware replacement for failures, software updates, patches, firmware updates, enhanced support, and access to designated points-of-contact within Riverbed which possess expert knowledge of Riverbed technologies along with access to proprietary knowledge and Riverbed development resources of the existing infrastructure creating a security material weakness. This will result in negative performance impact on mission critical applications including Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS)/Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA), Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS), Burial Operations Support System (BOSS), VA email, accessing files/databases, and other enterprise applications which are utilized by a large number medical, benefits, and burial VA personnel and Veterans daily.

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 Riverbed products. 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 Federal Business 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 technical experts reviewed WAN Acceleration solutions in June 2020 from multiple Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) to include, but not be limited to, Blue Coat Systems Inc., Dell EMC, Citrix, and Cisco Systems, Inc. While other networking hardware and software solutions from alternative manufacturers exist, as outlined in Section 5 of this Justification, because only Riverbed has access to the current hardware and software that communicates through a source code based on Riverbed proprietary data currently in place across the VA. The market research confirmed that the Riverbed solution leverages proprietary algorithms that no other OEM has access to. The technical experts further conducted market research determined that every vendor in the WAN Optimization market implements proprietary protocols and algorithms for hardware and software technical operations. Further market research through reputable industry periodicals validates that the use of proprietary protocols and algorithms make interoperability between OEMs impossible. No other vendor has the proprietary rights to provide hardware and software maintenance and technical support for Riverbed products.

determined that only Riverbed can provide the maintenance and technical support for hardware and software and can meet all of acceleration infrastructure.

In addition, the contract specialist (CS) conducted market research in August 2020 by using the NASA SEWP V GWAC Provider Lookup Tool to determine what vendors are capable of providing the full requirement. Based on this market research, the CS identified multiple resellers within NASA SEWP able to provide the required brand name products.

9. Other Facts: None.