NNG15SD31B-087.pdf

Palantir Gotham Analytics SaaS Control Number

VA-20-00030958

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: The proposed action is for a six-month firm-fixed-price delivery order issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for a brand name Palantir Gotham Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription to help address the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) response of VA. The subscription shall include hosting, operational support, professional services, and maintenance.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: VA, Office of Enterprise Integration, has an urgent need for the procurement of a brand name Palantir Gotham SaaS subscription for use by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to track and analyze COVID-19 outbreak areas and make timely decisions with insight into supply chain capacity, hospital inventory, social service utilization, and lab diagnostics.

The brand name Palantir Gotham SaaS data integration and analytic platform is the only solution that shall enable VA to securely integrate near real-time updating data of any format, including patient-level health record information, hospital capacity data, supply chain data for critical medical supplies and medical equipment, diagnostic testing data, Center for Disease Control and Prevention COVID-19 tracking data, Veterans population data and VA health care enrollee data.

With the data integrated, the SaaS platform must enable users to exchange insights and decisions securely within VA and externally with state, local, Federal, and private stakeholders via a suite of collaborative tools.

The solution shall be delivered in accordance with NASA SEWP V Procedures and will be fully operational and ready for immediate VA use after an Authority to Operate is granted. The subscription shall include hosting, operational support, professional services, and maintenance. The period of performance for this effort shall be six months from the date of award. The total estimated value of the proposed action is

4. 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 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: The proposed source for this action is i3 Federal LLC. (i3), 12030 Henderson Rd, Clifton, VA 20124. i3 is a Veteran Information Pages verified SDVOSB. i3 has previously provided supplies and services for VA and has proven that it has the necessary capabilities to meet all of the Government's requirements. i3 is also the only authorized reseller of this product outside of the original manufacturer. In light of the above, the Government's technical experts have determined that i3 is capable of meeting all of the Government's requirements and is considered a responsible SDVOSB.

Any delay to procure a cloud-hosted SaaS data integration and analytic platform would jeopardize VHA’s ability to track and analyze COVID-19 outbreak areas and make timely decisions with insight into supply chain capacity, hospital inventory, social service utilization, and lab diagnostics. Specifically, the Palantir SaaS capability is ready to use “out of the box” and will immediately enable VHA to automate a clearer, integrated, immediate sense of VA’s COVID-19 total care capacity: supply and demand for relevant equipment and supplies on-hand at hospitals, national COVID-19 case data, and projected national and regional COVID-19 demand. Without the Palantir SaaS capability, VHA will continue to have delayed access to information and analysis of COVID-19 demand in order to proactively manage the shifts in care capacity and medical supplies as the regional effects of the outbreak manifest heterogeneously. The results will be untimely coordination of care; shortage of medical supplies and personal protective equipment, and insufficient availability of service providers at the right facility at the right time to manage the geographical shift in COVID-19 outbreaks that could significantly impact patient safety.

A delay in obtaining the brand name Palantir Gotham SaaS would have detrimental effects on VA, Veterans, the patients VA serves, and the US population as a whole due to VA’s inability (or prevention of VA’s ability) to detect, treat, track detection and recovery rates, and make decisions that can decrease the coronavirus and COVID-19 infection rate of the US population.

Market research completed shows that to optimize the deployment of Government resources to address the COVID-19 pandemic, and to better serve Veterans with significantly greater efficiency using data-driven decisions, only the Palantir Gotham SaaS solution meets all of the following Government requirements:

a. A data agnostic platform to capture, curate, integrate, store, search, share, transfer, perform deconfliction, analyze, and visualize large amounts of disparate structured and unstructured data.

b. A commercial off-the-shelf software solution deployable on the day access is granted that can be configured within days for immediate use by VA analysts.

c. Software functionality that is flexible, adaptable and provides high rates of speed to capability. This allows VA to build data visualizations, workflows and micro-services quickly, using an iterative concept to design to deployment cycle.

d. The ability to maintain data origin and reproducibility of all integrated data sources. Every resource (e.g., dataset, analysis, report) must retain its origin and metadata that can be traced back to the exact version of all upstream code and data dependencies.

e. A dynamic data model, object-based search/discoverability, and analysis workflows, allowing easy definition of objects, properties and links that propagate from a source table, and provide natural ways to move between tabular and object-oriented interfaces and data analysis.

f. Intuitive and highly configurable user interfaces that can be effectively utilized by data scientists, analysts, executives, customer service representatives, logistics specialists, and contract specialists, among others.

g. Collaboration capabilities enabling teams comprising of technical and less technical roles to work seamlessly and concurrently on the same data and merge analytical paths in one place.

h. The ability to scale flexibly with increasing users, data, and pipeline complexity.

i. The ability to audit access of all data and analytical resources.

j. Proven granular security controls with the ability for data owners to easily control all downstream uses of the originating data, and the ability to conform to VA security policies.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in section 8 of this justification. Due to the unusual and compelling urgency of reacting to COVID-19 pandemic, only Palantir can supply the required subscription to meet VA’s needs. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D) the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Beta SAM Contract Opportunities page 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. Specifically, the Government will continue to monitor the marketplace to determine whether other brand name software emerges that would meet VA’s need.

8. Market Research: The Government’s technical experts conducted market research in March 2020 to determine products that met VA’s current COVID-19 response efforts. VA has an overall familiarity of other solutions from previous research to address different agency-wide needs and the Palantir solution was one of several solutions previously researched. With the emergence of the COVID-19 epidemic, an urgent need emerged for a solution that could be put in place as soon as possible and has the ability to analyze diverse data sets for VA epidemic response across all 1,243 medical facilities. The Government’s technical experts confirmed through this prior knowledge and current market research that Palantir Gotham is the only commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software solution deployable on the day access is granted that can be configured within days for immediate use by VA analysts to address the COVID-19 pandemic needs of VHA. Due to current market forecasts on supply availability and the natural bell curve of viral behavior, it is believed at this time that a six-month period of performance is necessary to address this need. Palantir Gotham SaaS services shall assist in optimizing VA’s medical response to the pandemic.

To that end, VA examined a suite of other data analytics tools, such as Alteryx and SEMOSS products. In the course of this research, and based upon prior experience with these platforms, the Government determined that deficiencies existed in two major areas. First, none of the competitor products could provide a COTS solution to capture, curate, integrate, store, search, share, transfer, perform deconfliction, analyze, and visualize disparate structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of internal and external sources to include VA systems, external commercial data sources, and unstructured, disaggregated data (emails, pdf, etc.). Second, none of the competitor products researched can be deployed out-of-the-box for use by VA analysts. The Palantir Gotham SaaS subscription is the only product that meets all of VA’s requirements.

Additional market research conducted in April 2020 indicates that i3 is the only reseller of the Palantir Gotham SaaS subscription. Palantir, the Original Equipment Manufacturer, also confirmed this through correspondence with contracting personnel. A Search of the Veteran Information Pages in April, 2020 confirmed that i3 is a verified SDVOSB. Also, a search of the System for Award Management in April, 2020 confirmed that i3 is approved for award with no active exclusions. The Government determined that in the interests of urgency in putting this order in place to assist VA in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as maximizing the utilization of SDVOSBs, VA intends to award the order to i3 under its NASA SEWP GWAC.

9. Other Facts: None.

10. Technical and Requirements Certification: I certify that the supporting data under my cognizance, which are included in this justification, are accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

11. Determination of Best Value: I hereby determine that the anticipated price to the Government for this contract action will be fair and reasonable based on catalog prices for products awarded on NASA SEWP V GWAC contracts which have already been determined to be fair and reasonable. Although price competition is not anticipated, the quote shall be compared to the Independent Government Cost Estimate to assist in ensuring price reasonableness.

Approval

In my role as procuring activity Advocate for Competition, based on the foregoing justification, I hereby approve the acquisition of brand name Palantir Gotham SaaS on an other than fair opportunity basis pursuant to the authority cited in paragraph 4 above, subject to availability of funds, and provided that the services herein described have otherwise been authorized for acquisition.

JUSTIFICATION FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY

Coordination Matrix