Redacted JA.pdf

DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY

NAVAL AIR WARFARE CENTER AIRCRAFT DIVISION

21983 BUNDY ROAD, BLDG 441

PATUXENT RIVER, MD 20670-1127

IN REPLY REFER TO

J&A No. 23-0332

SOLE SOURCE JUSTIFICATION AND APPROVAL

FOR USE OF OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

1. Contracting Activity.

Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWC-AD) Patuxent River, MD

2. Description of the Action Being Approved.

Award of a contract on a sole source basis to Hoylu, Inc., for the FY23 customized version of their commercial cloud-based Hoylu Enterprise whiteboard suite.

3. Description of Supplies/Services.

The proposed action is to award a Sole Source contract to Hoylu, Inc. to engineer and deliver a customized, Amazon Web Services (AWS)-based instance of the Hoylu Enterprise virtual whiteboarding software suite. The Hoylu solution will be fully customized and deployed within a NAVAIR owned and maintained AWS environment. Included within the effort are software update and bug fix releases, and general maintenance of the software to be provided by the vendor throughout the lifetime of the contract. The period of performance will be three years.

The total estimated value of this acquisition is using Research, Development, Test & Evaluation (RDT&E) funds, and is expected to be awarded in FY23. The table below depicts the type of funding as well as the estimated amount per fiscal year. This whiteboard solution will be utilized by the PEO-A Advanced Development Team (ADT) as its initial user base, but multiple RDT&E efforts can and will be eventual users of the software.

The certifying technical and requirements personnel have verified the Government’s minimum needs.

4. Statutory Authority Permitting Other Than Full and Open Competition.

10 U.S.C. 3204(a)(1), Only one responsible source and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.

5. Rationale Justifying Use of Cited Statutory Authority.

Hoylu, Inc. has developed a commercially available virtual whiteboard software suite that provides an easy-to-use, cloud-based, project management software solution that combines whiteboarding, planning and task management. The Hoylu whiteboard software (“Hoylu

J&A Number: 23-0332

Software”) enables Agile and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) planning through various visualization tools, playbooks and whiteboard templates.

The PEO-A Advanced Development Team (ADT) has a requirement for a whiteboarding software solution that enables the program’s Agile approach to project and lifecycle management of the program using SAFe methodologies. To fully enable and utilize this type of capability, the solution must adhere to Navy and ADT cyber, technical, integration and end user requirements.

A such, the whiteboarding solution must be approved for Information Level 4 (IL4) Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) data types, and provide continuous security updates to maintain continuous security posture. It must be available to be self-hosted and managed by the Government, and must be customized inside current Government AWS environment to enable quick migration and true collaborative deployment. It must also have out-of-the-box integrations with existing ADT Integrated Development Environment (IDE) software applications, e.g., Jira, Confluence, Mattermost, and must have open Application Programming Interface (API) to allow for in-house and future integration development. Finally, the whiteboarding solution must enable and support Agile and SAFe operations as well as project and program planning events to support roadmap exercises as well as program lifecycle review events as well as meet end user requirements such as usability and ease of use.

As explained below, throughout the market research performed by the ADT’s technical SMEs and end user customer base, Hoylu’s product was determined to be the only offering on the market that can meet all of the above requirements. Additionally, a competitor’s whiteboard product would result in additional costs and negative lead-time.

Hoylu offers the required end user experience for the ADT customer base, while truly aiding in Agile planning as dictated by the ADT charter. The Hoylu product has a much stronger anchor in Agile methodologies than any other solution tested. Additionally, Hoylu offers the most robust application integrations out-of-the-box amongst its competitors, while maintaining an open API for future integration development. Of all competitors, one solution offered a limited open API, however this required additional software engineering support and costs to support.

The Hoylu open API solution was more functional “out-of-the-box” and required less cost and lead time to use from a Government perspective.

Hoylu will provide an IL4 approved solution, working with the Government team to collaborate and develop the solution within a Government hosted AWS environment. This will increase deployment speed and reduce the toil of having to migrate developed systems to the Government. None of the competitors showed interest in developing in a fully Government hosted environment.

The market research indicated that competing products had longer lead times in delivering production-ready systems to the Government. These competitors, while able to provide a high-level overview and description of the systems, did not have experience in developing and deploying systems of this magnitude, at the required classification/security levels. The Government deemed these competing products to be risky with unknown, possibly longer, lead times.

Additionally, unlike Hoylu, the competitors require the development of their products to occur inside their own ecosystems. By contrast, Hoylu will develop the product inside the Government

J&A Number: 23-0332 provided environment, which will speed up product completion. Lastly, end users within the PEO-A ADT program have already used and established internal projects inside the test version of Hoylu. The program is using Hoylu commercial version in a limited, testing capacity, which will easily transfer to the newly customized Government version. By pursuing a different solution, there is rework and time impacts to transferring and re-engineering existing user cases from the Hoylu commercial version to a competitive product. Finally, market research also indicated that adopting the competing products would incur unnecessary costs related to staff retraining and a shift in project planning and agile protocols due to the competitors’ lack of features when compared to Hoylu. The “agile” features offered in Hoylu are more impactful and relevant to the current Safe Agile Framework (SAFe) protocols in place by the ADT program.

The lack of these Agile features will negatively affect the ADT program by causing a shift in some approaches to manage work already in use by the program.

6. Description of Efforts Made to Solicit Offers from as Many Offerors as Practicable.

The ADT technical SMEs conducted market research for two years, to include researching current cloud-based whiteboarding solutions available on the market.

The technical SMEs found that whiteboarding solutions currently on the market are at this moment not available at IL2 data levels nor is increasing to IL4 data levels within their roadmaps. The companies who do have IL4 migration within their roadmaps had lead times that did not meet the ADT project’s requirements.

Further, the ADT end user community tested multiple whiteboarding solutions on the market and determined Hoylu to be best-in-class from a usability and requirement meeting perspective.

A Sources Sought was published on 11 July 2023 as a sole source requirement on the SAM website to determine if there were any interested parties who could meet the requirement. No other source or authorized distributor expressed an interest in the requirement. In accordance with FAR Part 12, a Notice of Intent was posted in SAM on 26 July 2023.

7. Determination of Fair and Reasonable Cost.

The Contracting Officer has determined the anticipated cost to the Government of the supplies/services covered by this J&A will be fair and reasonable.

8. Actions to Remove Barriers to Future Competition.

For the reasons set forth in Paragraph 5, NAVAIR has no plans at this time to compete future contracts for the types of supplies/services covered by this document. If another potential source emerges, NAVAIR will assess whether competition for future requirements is feasible.