P03 JA - Informatica SW Maintenance final redacted.pdf

CONTROL NUMBER VA-24-00084481

JUSTIFICATIONFOR 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 Firm-Fixed-Price (FFP) Delivery Order issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for Informatica software maintenance.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Finance, Financial Services Center (FSC) has a requirement to procure brand name Informatica Premium Success Level Maintenance and Support. Informatica perpetual licenses are currently in use at VA FSC to extract, transfer, load, and data clean so VA can attain dependable numbers and reporting of Incurred but Not Reported data for the Office of Community Care (IBNR/OCC) and Office of Management (OM).

Data sets are in disparate systems that need to be integrated. Informatica allows the FSC to provide OCC and OM information for budgeting, forecasting, and financial management to support the actuarial models that balance the Financial Management System (FMS). The software ensures matching payments adjudicated within the claims systems against the FMS General Ledger (GL) transactions. The Period of Performance shall be 12 months, with two twelve-month option periods. The total estimated value of the proposed action is

4. Statutory Authority: The statutory authority permitting an exception to fair opportunity is Section 41 U.S.C. 4106(c)(2) as implemented by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 16.505(b)(2)(i)(B) 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 current VA claims processing system for OCC and OM uses perpetual Informatica software licenses. Due to the proprietary nature of that source code, no other vendor can provide patches and maintenance for the currently fielded software without access to the Informatica source code. Failure to acquire the maintenance subscription and support for this software would leave VA without the necessary updates, bug fixes, and certified technical support to ensure the software remains operational. VA does not possess the proprietary technical data required to maintain and upgrade the Informatica software in use at FSC. VA contacted Informatica to ascertain if this proprietary source code is for sale and was advised it is not. Therefore, only Informatica or its resellers can provide maintenance that is compatible with current perpetual Informatica software licenses installed and deployed. In addition, based on the proprietary nature of Informatica software, no other software license would be able to integrate and communicate with the currently fielded software due to a lack of interoperability or compatibility with the

Informatica Software Maintenance Control Number VA-24-00084481 currently fielded software. Due to these interoperability and compatibility issues, use of any other software would result in a complete redesign and redevelopment of the existing infrastructure which would result in extensive delivery delays and duplicated costs that would not be recovered through competition.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in Section 8 of this justification. This effort did not yield any additional sources that can meet the Go competition is viable among authorized resellers for the required brand name Informatica Software Maintenance. In accordance with FAR 16.505(a)(4)(iii)(A), this justification will be provided with the solicitation to all appropriate NASA SEWP V GWAC hold.

7. Actions to Increase Competition: In order to remove or overcome barriers to competition in future acquisitions for this requirement, the Government will continue to conduct market research to ascertain if there are changes in the market place that would enable future actions to be competed.

8. Market Research technical experts Specifically, FSC technical experts reviewed and brands and determined that neither product could seamlessly integrate into the existing VA applications. an on-premise solution whereas Informatica is a cloud-based solution. would require significant development and testing time (upwards of 5,800 hours) for custom and connectors since the databases are not hosted in or Although both of these brand names have maintenance capabilities, they do not have access to the Informatica proprietary source code and therefore could not provide the required maintenance to sustain the perpetual Informatica software licenses. As a result, it was determined that only Informatica or its authorized resellers can provide software

NASA SEWP

Manufacturer lookup indicated several SDVOSB Informatica authorized resellers in the marketplace.

9. Other Facts: None

10. Technical/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 of the successful quote to the Independent Government Cost Estimate.

12. Contracting Officer Certification/Approval I certify that this justification is accurate and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Approval

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