Justification_OGS_27July.pdf

UNCLASSIFIED

JUSTIFICATION

FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

PURSUANT TO FAR 6.104

CONTROL NUMBER: JA-FY25-041

1. IDENTIFICATION OF THE AGENCY AND THE CONTRACTING ACTIVITY.

National Geospatial-lntelligence Agency/ Office of Contract Services

2. NATURE AND/OR DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTION BEING APPROVED.

The nature and description of this action (justification) being approved is for a follow-on contract to the Open Geospatial Web Service Standards {OGWSS) Innovation Program (IP) indefinite delivery indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract for the development of voluntary, consensus-based international geospatial standards and their implementation into NGA's operational capabilities. The new Open

Geospatial Standards {OGS) will be continued as a multi-agency, IDIQ contract.

The present contractor, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is the only nonprofit organization to bring together a large number of international partners to include industry, academia, and government partners to collaborate and leverage each other's requirements in order to develop voluntary, consensus-based international geospatial standards. They are also the only nonprofit geospatial standards development organization with the required capability in geospatially focused standards development, validation and verification towards implementation within operational environments and systems.

Therefore, the planned acquisition falls under FAR 6.103-3 Industrial mobilization; engineering, developmental, or research capability; or expert services and authorized by 10 U.S.C. 3204(a)(3).

3. ESTIMATED VALUE AND PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE OR PROJECTED DELIVERY SCHEDULE.

a. ESTIMATED VALUE ($M): $19.9M

b. PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE, INCLUDING ALL OPTION PERIODS, OR PROJECTED DELIVERY SCHEDULE:

July 2026-June 2031

4. IDENTIFICATION OF THE STATUTORY AUTHORITY PERMITTING OTHER THAN FULL AND

OPEN COMPETITION.

The statutory authority permitting other than full an open competition is 10 U.S.C. 3204(a)(3) as implemented by FAR 6.103-3, "Industrial mobilization; engineering, developmental, or research capability; or expert services."

5. DESCRIPTION OF THE SUPPLIES OR SERVICES REQUIRED TO MEET THE AGENCY'S NEEDS.

Background: The OGS contract will replace the OGWSS single-award IDIQ contract (HM047621D0005).

The current OGWSS contract was awarded in 2021 under FAR 6.302-3 authority and expires on 17 Jan

2026.

NGA has been collaborating with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for over 20 years. The past performance focused on innovation of geospatial and location position system standards and developing interoperable community standards. Task orders under this IDIQ contract performed research on the use of information technology {IT), developed reference practices and user guides, and developed software and demonstrated its usage in real world scenarios to meet the National System for Geospatial Intelligence {NSG) requirements and mission through international collaboration with foreign government organizations, academia, and industry partners. The past performance baseline was the geospatial web service architecture consisting of web standards utilizing specifications of

Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal

Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI).

Description: The overall purpose of the OGS contract is to ensure international geospatial standards are fully tested and vetted against NGA and partner agency requirements prior to their recommendation as a mandated standard in the IC/DoD IT Standards Registry (ICSR/DISR). This ensures these standards are fully evaluated and ready for inclusion as requirements within NGA and partner agency acquisition programs.

The OGS contract scope includes support to advance the development of voluntary, consensus-based international geospatial standards. These standards will facilitate adoption of worldwide interoperability and data exchange among different geospatial products and services into mandated standards in the IC/DoD IT Standards Registry (ICSR/DISR). The efforts under this contract shall provide guidance and direction on standard implementations supporting operational capabilities of NGA and its partner agencies.

High level agency requirements to be covered under this contract include but are not limited to

Automated Feature and Observation Generation

Automated Classification Marking

Open Source Geospatial Augmentation

Change Detection

Multi-Int Spatial and Temporal Analysis and Visualization

Collection Gap Analysis

Cross Domain Collaboration

Management and Conflation of Multiple Datasets

Content Search and Discovery

Testing tools

Training

Operational Support (to include operational demonstrations i.e., Empire Challenge)

Open Routing

NSG Tile Cache

Next-Generation APls and Encodings

Open Portrayal

3D Standards

6. DEMONSTRATION OF THE PROPOSED CONTRACTOR'S UNIQUE QUALIFICATIONS OR THE NATURE

OF THE ACQUISITION THAT REQUIRES USE OF THE AUTHORITY CITED.

This action is justified pursuant to FAR 6.103-3(b)(2), award to a particular source is necessary to establish or maintain an essential engineering, research, or development capability provided by an educational or other nonprofit institution or a federally funded research & development center.

As stated in FAR 6.103-3(b)(2), full and open competition need not be provided for when it is necessary to award the contract to a particular source or sources in order to establish or maintain an essential engineering, research, or development capability to be provided by an educational or other nonprofit institution or a federally funded research and development center. Furthermore, as stated in OGC is the only non-profit geospatial standards development organization to meet the OGS requirement. OGC enables a platform for NGA and its partner agencies to form international partnerships and work collaboratively with industry, academia and other government agencies. The contractor is capable of providing a neutral environment in which developers and data suppliers work together to validate the ability of their products to interoperate with other offerings and implement interoperable geospatial standards. In addition, the contractor provides a process for users of geospatial technology to collaborate and share the costs of advancing technologies for future enterprise architectures.

7. DESCRIPTION OF EFFORTS MADE TO ENSURE THAT OFFERS ARE SOLICITED FROM AS MANY

POTENTIAL SOURCES AS POSSIBLE.

Market research was conducted and the Government determined that the OGS requirement is a noncommercial requirement and there are no other sources capable of meeting the requirement.

Section 9 provides further detail regarding the market research conducted. Additionally, it is necessary to maintain this essential engineering and research capability. A Notice of Intent to Sole Source has been posted on SAM.gov in accordance with FAR 5.101. The approved Justification and Approval (J&A) will be made publicly available within 14 days after contract award in a posting to SAM.gov in accordance with

FAR 6.301(b).

8. CONTRACTING OFFICER DETERMINATION THAT THE ANTICIPATED COST TO THE GOVERNMENT

WILL BE FAIR AND REASONABLE.

Prior to award of each task order, the Contracting Officer will ensure that a fair and reasonable price is obtained. This will be done by using the price/cost analysis techniques outlined in FAR 15. A

Certificate of Current Cost or Pricing Data will be required when a task order meets the applicable threshold.

9. DESCRIPTION OF THE MARKET RESEARCH CONDUCTED AND THE RESULTS OR A STATEMENT OF THE

REASON MARKET RESEARCH WAS NOT CONDUCTED.

Market research was conducted to collect data from NGA's industry partners for the benefit of ensuring the source selection process delivers quality and timely products and services to the

Warfighter and the Nation at the best value to the taxpayer. NGA sought to acquire market research to determine if the required services could be competitively obtained and/or help support NGA small business goals.

The acquisition team employed the following market research techniques to assemble and analyze the information necessary for the planning of this acquisition. Market research consisted of issuing a

Sources Sought Notice, reviewing Sam.gov for sources sought synopsis and awarded contracts, searching GSA/FSS (GSAAdvantage)/ SAMS/Dynamic Small Business Search (DSBS), search of the internet to assess the capabilities of standards development organizations, research of existing contracts from other federal agencies, and review of recent market research from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to meet similar requirements.

The market research conducted was aimed at identifying vendors which can provide geospatial standard development and implementation services to meet technology challenges associated with cloud architectures. The market research focused on services for experimentation based on research and development programs that explore geospatial technology from various angles between testing environments reference lines and the oncoming geospatial standards flow. Also, the market research looked into design experimentation that seizes ideals to develop new specifications. The program management office (PMO) reviewed an agile sprint approach to experiment with emerging ideals in the context of geospatial standards to improve interoperability of existing standards. It also evaluated the feasibility of pilots to implement standards-based architecture. The research reviewed the previous contract about neutral environments in which developers and data suppliers work together to validate the ability of their products to interoperate with other offerings implementing the same interoperable geospatial standards. The market research focused on expertise to support operational experiment events to validate geospatial standards against real user activities in what are as close as possible to real operational settings.

The results of the market research show that the OGS requirement is a non-commercial requirement which cannot be satisfied by small business. There were several vendors with working knowledge of and experience with standards development. However, all of them lack expertise in providing an environment for emerging innovative ideals with technology in support of geospatial standards with international partners, as well as Geospatial Standards Development, Testing & Compliance. In fact, many of the identified vendors actually collaborate with OGC in the area of geospatial standards development. As a consequence, the PMO concluded that OGC is the only capable source and non-profit organization that can meet all of the OGS requirements.

10. ANY OTHER FACTS SUPPORTING THE USE OF OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION.

PROCUREMENT HISTORY

(1) Current contract: HM0476-21-D0005 (January 2021-January 2026)

(2) Competitive status of these actions: Sole source acquisition

(3) Authority for other than full and open competition previously used: FAR 6.302-3

(4) The new OGS contract will include application programming interface (API), in addition to the current web services, while remaining largely similar to the current contract with the following requirements:

Include the annual OGC membership fee

Provide technical support for operational experiments and web standards architecture integration issues

Provide OGC standards training

Provide services to develop and implement collaboration and compliance tools

OGS will be continued as a multi-agency contract to allow for better coordination between U.S. government agencies.

11. LISTING OF SOURCES, IF ANY, THAT EXPRESSED, IN WRITING, AN INTEREST IN THE ACQUISITION.

As a response to NGA's sources sought notice posted to SAM.gov from 4/03/2025 - 4/28,2025, the

Government received capability statements from the following vendors:

Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) ECS

Federal LLC

Guidehouse Inc.

FEDITC

Thomas & Herbert Consulting LLC (Small Business)

The PMO reviewed the sources sought notice responses and assessed the vendor's capabilities to satisfy the OGS requirement. The detailed analysis may be found in the market research report. None of the interested businesses are non-profit organizations. It is, therefore, unlikely that they would be able to compete with OGC's prices due to its cost-sharing model. In addition, the development of standards by a commercial firm creates a potential conflict-of interest and bias towards their own products and services. This will not satisfy OGS requirement of developing free, voluntary, consensus-based international geospatial standards that facilitate worldwide interoperability and data exchange among different geospatial products and services. This supports the PMO's conclusion that OGC is the only capable source and nonprofit organization that can meet all of the OGS requirements.

12. STATEMENT OF THE ACTIONS, IF ANY, THE AGENCY MAY TAKE TO REMOVE OR OVERCOME ANY

BARRIERS TO COMPETITION BEFORE ANY SUBSEQUENT ACQUISITION FOR THE SUPPLIES OR SERVICES

REQUIRED.

At this point, there is only one known consortium group with a worldwide membership and with the established geospatial information infrastructure to provide the support that has been identified.

However, NGA will continue to conduct market research and review existing information to determine whether or not there are other viable sources that can be solicited to meet mission needs.