P03 - Redacted Sole Source JA FY21 GIS GHESS.pdf

GIS GHESS Software/License Renewal Control Number: VA-20-00094435

LIMITED-SOURCES JUSTIFICATION

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Procurement Acquisition and Logistics Technology Acquisition Center 1701 Director’s Blvd.

Austin, TX 78744

2. Description of Action: The proposed action is for issuance of a twelve (12) month firm-fixed price (FFP) task order with additional four (4) 12-month option periods for Geographic Information System (GIS) Healthcare Enterprise Service and Support (GHESS) Enterprise License Agreement (ELA). This effort is being conducted under the authority of the Multiple Award Schedule Program; the proposed effort will be awarded on a sole-source basis to Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) located at 380 New York Street, Redlands, CA 92373 under the terms and conditions of its General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) GS-35F-

253CA.

3. Description of Supplies or Services: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Chief Strategy Office (CSO) requires continuation of a Geographic Information System (GIS) Healthcare Enterprise Service and Support (GHESS) Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) to continue providing various ESRI ArcGIS software, cloud services, data, and support services in support of creating a GIS shared services platform across multiple disparate offices of 1 OP. This will enable multiple offices that are responsible for planning healthcare initiatives, as well as policy makers, access to a uniform platform that is non-variable by providing a consistent infrastructure for geo-spatial data development, analysis, cartographic products and access to web services. The contractor will provide unlimited user licenses to deploy and share software and cloud services for the ArcGIS software suite of products, Enterprise Advantage Program, Right to Call Staff support, Home Use Program, and Street-Map Premium Advanced, US Data Only, Navteq version subscription. The contractor will provide access to two software as a service portals capable of supporting simultaneous users and a portal maintained on Geospatial Service Support Center (GSSC) servers, Tier 2 helpdesk support, and all training offered through ESRI's online training library. The period of performance shall be December 1, 2020 through November 30, 2021, plus four 12-month option periods. The estimated price of the proposed action is .

4. Statutory Authority: This acquisition is conducted under the authority of the Multiple-Award Schedule Program. The specific authority providing for a limited source award is Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 8.405-6(a)(1)(i)(B), “Only one source is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services are unique or highly specialized.”

5. Rationale Supporting Use of Authority Cited Above: Based on extensive market research as described in paragraph 8 of this document, it was determined that only one source can provide this requirement. VA has one of the largest patient and non-patient record data sets in the United States. Other GIS software can extract data, but it does

Control Number: VA-20-00094435 not have the capability of performing advanced geospatial analysis within the same software program. The offices of VHA require tools that enable their staff members to analyze spatial data and extract meaningful information from these extremely large data sets. Only ESRI's products can handle this vast amount of geospatial data. There is no other GIS Product that can process and analyze large data sets while providing the required support and software reliability. Other similar GIS products would not be able to meet VA requirements, making it impossible for GIS offices to deliver data that are critical to VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks (MISSION) Act initiatives, rural health programs, and VHA-wide data driven decisions. Any other alternative GIS product would be unable to process and analyze the large amount of data VA requires and would encounter severe performance degradation and software unavailability and downtime. This extensive amount of data includes the entire enrollee and non-enrollee population, which is about 4 gigabits of data per copy.

VA also uses ESRI software and data for running Veteran drive time analysis.

Only ESRI's products can process and analyze this amount of data and use location allocation or similar network analysis tools. The location allocation technique is a VA requirement that utilizes algorithms within a GlS system to determine an optimal location for one or more facilities that will service demand for a given set of Veteran data points. This technique allows VA to analyze the healthcare needs of the Veteran population and Veteran population density when planning for sites of care. For instance, VA can identify an optimal location to place a care center or a telehealth access point based on the number of Veterans in that area. This allows planners to provide clinical access to the greatest number of Veterans. Without this required functionality, which only ESRI offers, VA would not be able to strategically place sites of care and provide efficient and effective healthcare to Veterans.

The cornerstone of the GHESS ELA is the unlimited enterprise user license agreement which will grant CSO and GSSC the right to deploy and share the products listed in the product description for this effort during the term of the ELA to all other VHA offices including those responsible for MISSION Act initiatives and data driven decisions. The ELA also grants policy makers access to a shared geospatial platform that provides a consistent infrastructure for geo-spatial data development, analysis, cartographic products, and web services to plan for the needs of Veterans. No other GIS software manufacturer offers an enterprise license that enables a shared services platform for software products that can be hosted within the VA network (on premise). Hosting within the VA network will allow VHA to effectively manage and enforce data access policies across VHA offices, to provide consistency, promote integrity, and ensure data security, in alignment with recent mandated legislation (Geospatial Data Act). In addition, ESRI's GIS software is the only software suite that enables VHA users to detect patterns, access trends, conduct geo-spatial analytics, create data visualization through maps, make sound decisions based on trusted concurrent data and provide the ability to share these results among VHA users in the form of interactive maps and dashboards. These are VA functional requirements that no other GIS software can provide.

Additionally, ESRI's suite of product licenses and maintenance support provides a solution that is compatible with the existing VA infrastructure and is embedded within current VA business systems. Currently, VA's GIS infrastructure is based upon ESRI products, and the entire server architecture that surrounds the ESRI solution has been built to be interoperable with ESRI's suite of products, as discussed further below in this justification. It has taken the GSSC appropriately 20 years to build and develop this current ESRI-based infrastructure which is continually expanding. GSSC anticipates use of this infrastructure for at least the next five years. Additionally, VA has built customized tools, scripts, and processes that would have to be re-engineered to be utilized on a non-ESRI solution. No other product can work in this environment and communicate with the existing infrastructure. If any other product were utilized, VA would be unable to utilize many years of embedded regional and national workflow data and would have to rebuild its current GIS enterprise environment to accommodate new and non-proprietary software. In addition to retraining existing staff, it would take approximately 1 – 1.5 years for current full time GIS analysts to rebuild the 5-600 applications, 1500 web maps, and nearly 2000-layer services that provide business solutions to VHA programs. During the redevelopment period, hundreds of content contributors and thousands of data viewers/consumers from many program offices across VHA would be unable to access the data and tools they’ve relied upon for the past 5-10 years.

In addition, a shift to other software products would cause VA to lose interoperability, as ESRI is the only GIS·software that interoperates with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Sequel Server (SQL), and Python, to perform the geospatial analysis as required by VA.

GSSC's platform must integrate with Microsoft Windows and other Microsoft software products. This solution leverages the Microsoft Windows platform to provide the infrastructure for geospatial data processing and storage. This is seamless to the end user, but enables them to have a central, secure location for accessing, designing, managing, and sharing geospatial information without requiring additional processing, storage and network infrastructure. In addition, ArcGIS interfaces with various Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint as well as Microsoft Structured Query Language (SQL), which accommodates large increases of data and users and enables GSSC to easily and more cost-effectively grow our enterprise system and web applications. No other source provides this same interoperability with Microsoft products.

The GSSC, using ESRI's GlS solution, has developed a prototype Enrollee Drive Time Processor (EDTP) tool that is unique to the industry and relies on Python scripting to ensure optimized processing and consistent, repeatable results. The EDTP tool is used to serve over 9 million enrolled Veterans and over 1200 facilities for defining optimum routes to facilities with proper care. This tool uses a geocoding process to identify addresses which can then be used by the ESRI's ArcGIS analysis tools for determining best routes and other pertinent information. No other vendor in the marketplace currently supports the EDTP tool since it was based upon ESRI's proprietary ArcGIS suite of products. Switching to another vendor's GIS software would render the EDTP tool inoperable.

Furthermore, even if another product was available that could meet VA’s requirements, the entire GIS platform would have to be re-built from multiple different suppliers. The platform would have to be coded and scripted and a new portal would have to be created which would impact mission critical data currently provided to VHA. GSSC would also require a new GIS Services contract to re-write code and scripts so new infrastructure would work across multiple vendor products. No other source other than ESRI can provide the aforementioned services due to proprietary constraints.

Specifically, any other source would need access to ESRI's proprietary data in order to ensure that the services provided are properly configured and patched through. This code ensures that the services provided will allow the ESRI products to remain fully operational and work in the current ESRI based environment. Redeveloping the EDTP and other tools, re-engineering automated processes, and revising standard operating procedures would take months of development time at a cost of in contractor time/expense.

Market Research was performed to identify other sources that could meet the Governments requirements and provide Vector based analysis, work within Microsoft Office Suite of Products, and run processes via Python scripting. It also sought to identify sources that could work with the current GIS tools created specifically for GSSC's unique needs. All other GIS software products on the market are either limited in products/services selection, have limited spatial analytic capabilities, and/or are limited by a less integrated shared services platform as explained in Section 8. Using other software products would result in substantial duplication of cost to the government that would not be recoverable through competition. ESRI provides a unique service and is the only vendor that can provide these types of services. ESRI does not provide its proprietary source code to any of its authorized service partners and although some ESRI services can be acquired through an ESRI authorized partner, partners are limited to providing services and cannot provide an Enterprise Agreement.

If VA pursued any other GIS tool there would be an adverse impact on many key VHA program offices and their associated programs. These programs include the VA Enrollee Health Care Projection Model, the VHA Health Care Planning Model, the VHA GIS Planning Portal that serves VHA's Veterans Integrated Service Networks and facilities, the seven legacy VHA/10P GIS Healthcare Enterprise Support and Services program offices, including the Office of Rural Health, Population Health, and VHA Support Service Center, ad-hoc inter-agency collaborations requiring geospatial analyses (e.g. VHA collaborates with Department of Defense and Indian Health Service), and most importantly, GHESS supports Section 101 of the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act (VACAA) of 2014, and Sections 101 and 401 of the MISSION Act. GHESS support leverages robust geoprocessing tools that are unique to ESRI's ArcGIS suite of products such as the Network Analyst and Spatial Analyst extensions to provide driving distance calculations to nearest site of care for 9+ million enrollees. Without continued use of ESRI’s product, care to Veterans would be negatively impacted and the applications that program offices rely upon daily would be non-functional for months or longer while new applications were built.

6. Efforts to Obtain Competition: Market research was conducted, details of which are in the Section 8 of this document. This effort did not yield any valid additional sources that can meet the Government’s requirements. There is no competition anticipated for this acquisition. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 8.405-6(a)(2) the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Federal Business Opportunities website 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 competition in future actions.

8. Market Research: The Government’s technical experts conducted market research in September 2020 by reviewing similar software solutions that could provide vector-based analysis, work within Microsoft Office Suite of Products, and with Python scripting. It also included companies that could work with the current GIS tools created specifically for GSSC's unique needs. All other GIS software products on the market are either limited in products/services selection, have limited spatial analytic capabilities, and/or are limited by a less integrated shared services platform as explained below.

Imagine software is cartographic software, but it fails to meet all of VA's requirements as outlined above. Specifically, it does not perform vector-based geospatial analysis through points, lines, and polygons with no focus on imagery. It does not allow for Python scripting and does not work with Microsoft products. For example, the software fails to work with SQL and the user cannot download an analysis into Excel or any other similar format that VA is capable of utilizing. It also does not meet VA's interoperability requirements with the existing ArcGIS infrastructure.

Hexagon software is cartographic software, but it also fails to meet all of VA's requirements as outlined above. It does not handle vector-based geospatial analysis through points, lines, and polygons with no focus on imagery or allow for Python scripting. Its target customer is for remote sensing capabilities such as imagery analysis. The software focuses more on the size, latitude, and longitude of buildings to support unmanned technologies and drone activity. It also does not meet VA's interoperability requirements with the existing ArcGIS infrastructure.

Maptitude Mapping Software performs similar functionality; however, it is limited in only polygon format when shape files are needed and does not meet all of VA's requirements as outlined above. This software has limited layer availability while VA needs a living atlas that is built with content contributed by organizations around the world through the Community Maps Program. This software cannot handle the large data sets that the VA requires from a vendor. This software cannot be integrated with the already functioning platform in GSSC which would require downloads of ESRI products to use. It also does not meet VA's interoperability requirements with the existing ArcGIS infrastructure.

ESRI was the only vendor found that provided a solution capable of meeting the Governments requirements. No other solutions were found that could support/offer the services and the support required to work with the VA large data sets, existing computer scripting, and offer an enterprise license.

In addition, the Contract Specialist issued a sources sought notice on SAM.gov Contract Opportunities and SEWP in October 2020. The notice also included the Product Description required for the software/licensing products and requested information on other available products that would meet the VA’s requirement. The government received two responses from the Sources Sought posting.

The first response was from the incumbent contractor Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a Large Business, that stated they could perform and reply to the government’s solicitation when posted, they also submitted a letter stating that they were the only company that had the rights to manufacture and sell ESRI brand name software/license products.

The second response was submitted by Heartland GIS stating that they could sell ESRI products. This company did not state whether they were a small or large business, however; when the government attempted to confirm the company’s existence, it was noted they didn’t submit a DUNS number nor were they registered in VIP. The Contract Specialist replied on October 24, 2020 to the email in which the company submitted their RFI response; asking them to confirm their business size and the DUNS number if they were registered in SAM. No responses were received. In the meantime, it was noted the company also submitted with their response, a partnership letter stating they were authorized distributors of the brand name ESRI GHESS GIS ELA software products needed for this requirement. However, after some investigative research done by the CS, it’s noted the partnership letter submitted only authorized Heartland to work as an administrator and not as an authorized reseller of ESRI GHESS GIS ELA software.

Based on this market research, it was determined that ESRI is the only company that can provide the GHESS ELA software, services and support that meets the VA’s requirement.

9. Other facts: None.