P03 JA - FAR 13 - North52_Redacted.pdf

JUSTIFICATION FOR OTHER THAN FULL AND OPEN COMPETITION

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

Austin, TX 78744

2. Description of Action: The proposed Brand Name action is for a firm-fixed-price contract to renew existing North52 software licenses which includes software maintenance, and technical support for North52 brand software.

3. Description of Supplies or Services: The Department of Veterans Affairs

(VA), Office of Information & Technology, Enterprise Program Managemetn Office (EPMO), Veterans Experience Services (VES) Portfolio, Veteran Relationship Management (VRM) requires renewal of one (1) existing North52 Business Process Activities (BPA) Software licenses for the VRM program. The license includes software maintenance for 12 production systems under the VRM. This maintenance provides access to all software updates and patches, which includes maintenance releases and major version releases for the North52 BPA software license. VRM is a suite of products that provide authoritative information on an as needed basis to support Veteran, beneficiary and service provider inquiries. This enables VA to handle and respond to more inquiries in an accurate and timely manner.

North52 is a business rule engine that transforms our custom coding into simple formulas. It is significantly faster than writing custom code and lowers the costs to maintain business rule changes in our MS D365 SaaS products.

The period of performance shall be 12 months for the Base Period with two

(2) 12-month option periods. The total estimated value of the proposed effort inclusive of the 12-month base period and two (2) 12-month option periods is

4. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: The statutory authority permitting other than full and open competition is 41 U.S.C. 3304(a)(1) as implemented by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 6.302-1 entitled, “Only One Responsible Source and No Other Supplies or Services Will Satisfy Agency Requirements

5. Reason for Authority Cited: Based on market research, as described in paragraph 8 of this justification, it was determined that limited competition is available for this procurement. However, VA technical personnel conducted market research in January through February 2021, which consisted for Brand Name North52 products and similar software maintenance, including InRule and Microsoft Customer Relationship Management Software. As a

North52 Software Maintenance result of the market research, it was determined that due to proprietary constraints no other software maintenance was found to be compatible and interoperable with existing VA infrastructure. Specifically, no other source has access to North52’s proprietary codes and data to ensure that the services provided are properly configured and implemented. Without the renewal of the North52 BPA software maintenance services for the existing licenses VA will not be able to receive critical software updates, enhancements, software corrections, and technical support; all which pose an immediate risk to VA’s operational capability across twelve production systems under the VRM program and cause additional delays, costs, technical issues, and man-hours. All of these concerns would have a negative impact to the VA. No other source is capable of providing the required software maintenance that meets the VA’s unique functional requirements.

North52 has been able to provide the necessary workflow capabilities that successfully meet the architectural and application requirements for the VA VRM program. Test and implementation of another product cannot be performed in a live production environment. The use of any alternate product would require downtime for the existing solution, which would delay the processing of Veterans benefits and critical support services to Veterans in crisis. To avoid downtime additional cost would be incurred for hardware, software resources and training to establish an alternate test environment.

There is no anticipated savings by competing this requirement that would offset the costs by switching software platforms, since North52 is proprietary and no other software maintenance is compatible and interoperable with existing VA infrastructure. Considering everything stated above, North52 is the only software platform that fully meets the VA’s functional requirement.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in section eight (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 licenses, as well as software maintenance and support. In accordance with FAR 6.302- 1(c)(1)(ii)(c) and 5.102(a)(6) this justification shall be posted with the solicitation. Furthermore, the proposed action will be synopsized on the Contracting Opportunities Page in accordance with FAR 5.201. 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 market that would enable future actions to be competed.

8. Market Research: VA technical personnel conducted market research in

January – February 2021, which consisted of a review of the similar software

North52 Software Maintenance maintenance, including InRule and Microsoft CRM software. As a result of the market research, it was determined that no other software was found to be compatible and interoperable with the existing VA software. No source other than North52 can provide the required software maintenance due to proprietary constraints. Specifically, no other source has access to North52’s proprietary data and software code to ensure that the services provided are properly configured and implemented. This code ensures that the services provided will enable the North52 products to remain fully operational to support the existing VA environment. Therefore, no other contractor has the capability of developing and issuing software updates and fixes for North52 BPA software necessary to support existing VA CRM requirements.

The Contract Specialist (CS) conducted additional market research in June 2021 by using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-Wide Acquisition Center (GWAC) Provider Lookup tool to determine what vendors are capable of meeting the requirement. This search revealed that there were three small businesses that were authorized resellers of North 52.

Amongst those three vendors, only one was an SDVOSB/VOSB. A Request for Information (RFI) was also issued on the NASA SEWP and there were no responses to the RFI. The CS sent correspondence to the OEM to obtain a list of authorized resellers and the OEM provided one SDVOSB that was an authorized seller that was not on NASA SEWP. Based on this market research, this requirement will be posted to Sam.gov along with this Brand Name justification with a set aside for SDVOSB.

9. Other Facts: None.