P03. JA FinOps Training - Linux Foundation_Redacted.pdf

VA-24-00040026

JUSTIFICATION FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement, Acquisition, and Logistics

1701 Directors Blvd Austin, TX 78744

2. Description of Action: The proposed sole source action is for a one-year, firm-fixed price (FFP) effort to acquire Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) training from The Linux Foundation 548 Market Street, PMB 57274, San Francisco, California 94104-5401 (US.

3. Description of Supplies or Services:

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Information and Technology (OIT), Infrastructure Operations (IO) requires training in Cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) principles.

The FinOps framework provides a best practices approach for managing the cloud environment by providing education on optimizing cloud expenditure. FinOps training will provide participants with a set of tools, procedures, and methods that will enable them to better understand and control cloud expenses while maximizing value, speed, cost, and quality. The FinOps Certified Professional course requires 50 hours of self-paced, online work over several weeks and does not require travel. These courses are for new certifications only. Seats are needed for the following training sessions: Personas (45), Containers (7), Practitioner (42), and Professional (7).

FinOps Personas: Provides an overview of FinOps, the practice of FinOps, how to work with the FinOps team, and how to collaborate/understand each of the other FinOps personas (leadership, engineering, product owners, procurement).

FinOps for Containers: Provides a review of the container environments that engineers work with in the public cloud and examines ways that engineers can perform FinOps activities on container spending. Provides a top-down review of container environments for engineers working with container infrastructures, which includes how to talk about container environments with non-engineers, how to identify sources of wasted cost in container environments, how to build in observability to track cost, and how to handle idle and shared elements of the environment.

FinOps Practitioner Certification: Provides FinOps fundamentals and an overview of key concepts in each of the three sections of the FinOps lifecycle: Inform, Optimize, and Operate. The course provides an understanding of FinOps and how it is applied to enhance business value from cloud spend.

FinOps Certified Professional: This course is usually 40-50 hours of anticipated online work over several weeks. Much of the work is self-paced with two virtual instructor-led trainings. This course is for experienced FinOps practitioners and covers each capability in fine detail while building, managing, and evolving FinOps teams.

4. Statutory Authority: The statutory authority permitting other than full and open competition is 41 U.S.C. § 1901 Simplified acquisition procedures implemented by Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Subpart 13.106. In accordance with this subpart and 41 U.S.C. § 3304(e), this justification documents the circumstances of the contract action that deem only one source reasonably available (FAR 13.106-1(b)(1)(i)

VA-24-00040026

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: FinOps software is proprietary to The Linux Foundation. Based on market research, the VA has determined that no other source is capable of providing the multiple, relevelant training/instruction for FinOps.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted along with a Request for Information (RFI), details of which are in the market research section of this document. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. This effort did not yield any additional sources that can meet the Government’s needs. No SDVOSB vendors were found who could provide the requirement.

Any proposals that are received shall be evaluated.

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 Government’s technical experts conducted market research by reviewing other similar certification solutions. The market research is an ongoing process that started in August 2023 and is continuously being conducted, as recently as December 2023. Based on the proprietary nature of the FinOps software, training curriculum, and current understanding of the VA’s financial archeticture, only The Linux Foundation can meet VA’s requirements to provide FinOps training to the IO Team.

Market Research was also conducted by an RFI through System for Award Management (SAM).

There were 3 Responses and of those responses and the information that they provided, the vendors offered to replace the entire VA Cloud enterprise and could not provide all of the courses that are being requested for this commitment.

9. Other Facts: The required training is proprietary to The Linux Foundation, formal FinOps software training availability is limited to The Linux Foundation with no other vendor currently offering the multiple FinOps training courses that are being requested.

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. Fair and Reasonable Cost Determination: I hereby determine that the anticipated price to the Government for this contract action will be fair and reasonable based on a comparison to established list pricing and against the IGCE.