Redacted JA- BMC SaaS.pdf

CONTROL NUMBER: VA-24-00057862

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 firm-fixed price delivery order that will be issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for brand name BMC Software, Inc. (BMC) Helix Continuous Optimization (BHCO) Software as a Service (SaaS), professional services and support.

3. Description of the Supplies or Services: VA Office of Information and Technology, Capacity and Performance Engineering (CPE), has a requirement for a deployed, operable and maintained brand name BHCO SaaS environment. CPE’s existing installation of BMC’s TrueSight Capacity Optimization (TSCO) software is currently used for performing functions to collect, store, and analyze capacity and performance metrics. However, BMC has announced that the version of TSCO, that is used by CPE, ceased full support on March 31, 2024; the software is no longer receiving functional enhancements. Therefore, CPE’s current software is no longer available in the marketplace to new customers and is not a viable solution to current systems since functional updates are no longer being made to it.

As a result of TSCO software’s end of life, BMC’s Capacity and Performance tool, BHCO SaaS, is the latest iteration of a BMC product providing similar capabilities met by BMC’s TSCO software. CPE Subject Matter Experts assessed this latest iteration of BMC’s Capacity and Performance tool and determined the SaaS offers all the current functionalities required by the Government and its existing system. While maintaining some core TSCO collection techniques, BHCO provides additional features and capabilities when compared to its predecessor, TSCO. The advanced features and capabilities will improve CPE’s ability to analyze capacity and performance data, lead to increased insights, and improve capacity and performance recommendations to the VA IT enterprise. Overall, this product will be utilized in the analysis and engineering of capacity and performance characteristics for VA Information Technology (IT) systems located across the Agency.

For a limited time, up to September 2025, CPE will need to run both TSCO and BHCO side by side while efforts are undertaken to transition from TSCO to BHCO. During that time frame, CPE will need simultaneous support for both products. BMC is the only vendor that can provide support for both products as no other vendor will have access to proprietary software code, manufacturer technical resources and requisite SaaS environments.

CPE BMC Helix Continuous Optimization Control Number: VA-24-00057862

Furthermore, the proposed action requires BMC’s professional services to assist CPE in the initial configuration and transition to BHCO SaaS, migration of existing BMC TSCO data to the new BHCO environment, professional services, instructions on how to place service requests, optional data migration services and VA-specific Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) artifacts. Utilizing BMC’s migration services, TSCO data will be migrated to BHCO preserving the historical capacity and performance data collected over many years of TSCO operation. The ability to continue to have access to the historical TSCO data while utilizing BHCO will allow CPE to understand capacity and performance trends and leverage the information to make informed decisions and adapt strategies accordingly. The vendor will also perform the required tasks to support a successful issuance of a VA Authority to Operate for BHCO before the TSCO contract expires in September 2025.

The period of performance includes a base period of 12 months from the date of award and four, 12-month option periods to include: BMC Helix Continuous Optimization - SaaS – Annual Subscription Services and Moviri Integrator for BMC Solutions - MarketZone - OnPremise annual Subscription. Also, optional tasks are included in the base and option periods one through four, for additional BMC Success Subscription - Starter Services, and BMC Success Credits 25 Pack Services. Optional tasks are included in option periods one through four, for BMC Helix Continuous Optimization - SaaS – Subscription for a minimum of 800 subscriptions. Lastly, in option period four, there is an optional task for outgoing transition support. The total estimated price for the proposed action is inclusive of all option periods and optional tasks.

4. Statutory 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: Based on the market research, as described in section 8 of this justification, it was determined that limited competition is available for this procurement amongst resellers. As noted above, VA deployed TSCO software solution is near end of life and through market research with salient characteristics provided, and identified that only the BHCO SaaS solution is capable of meeting the Government’s minimum functional and interoperability requirements to replace TSCO.

BHCO is the only IT Capacity optimization software product that can meet all of the Government’s minimum functional requirements. Specifically, the Government requires an IT Capacity optimization product that can collect system performance metrics, provide a capacity planning capability, and provide the predictive analysis, modeling and forecasting that can operate in the type of computing environment present within VA and perform the aforementioned functions across the diverse computing environment across the Agency. As stated in Section 8, market research, Subject Matter Experts reviewed several alternatives as well as trade publications and concluded that no other IT Capacity optimization software products offered the minimum functionality required by the Government or compatibility with CPE’s existing installation of BMC software due to the proprietary nature of BMC’s source code.

TSCO has been in use by VA for at least nine years and has a deep footprint in VA infrastructure. BHCO is BMC’s successor to TSCO and reuses existing data collection components. Historical TSCO data is stored in a proprietary database format, making it accessible only to BMC applications. As VA is migrating from TSCO to BHCO, the proposed action requires proprietary code in order to transfer data from TSCO to BHCO as a step in the migration process. As a result of the proprietary nature of TSCO and BHCO data, only BMC can provide the software components which can communicate with the agents deployed to VA production health care systems, without a need to deploy a new collection agent or mechanism. Should another vendor’s developed or provided solution be utilized, it would require the complete removal of the existing solution (including the deployed collection agents and mechanisms within the VA IT infrastructure), testing, development, and redeployment of an alternate solution.

An alternative solution other than BHCO would hinder VA’s OIT CPE ability to fulfill its mission to continuously monitor the following: current capacity and utilization levels of IT resources; transaction throughput; network bandwidth; age of data; workload and service demand data collection; cost analysis related to Operation and Maintenance of resources; quality of service; other metrics required to make inform decisions; and planning and adapting strategies to ensure capacity headroom and performance of IT resources and systems across the Agency.

In essence, the migration from TSCO to BHCO allows for continuity in capacity management practices, leveraging existing data and infrastructure. Currently CPE uses TSCO to collect capacity and performance metrics from over 800 production systems and 100 preproduction systems. TSCO analyzes and archives the capacity and performance metrics using a proprietary data format. TSCO and BHCO use this proprietary data to analyze and predict future capacity and performance issues. To replace BMC with a new vendor would require VA to start from scratch, losing the historical data which is necessary for predictive analysis. This exclusive access to historical data is crucial for modeling and forecasting system behavior. Losing this historical data would significantly impair CPE’s ability to project future system behavior accurately. With a new system, current data is lost entirely. Historical capacity and performance data would need to be re-acquired all over, at an estimated minimum of a three-year period, in order to obtain a sufficient baseline for trend analysis and to create predictive statistical models. Additionally, VA will need approximately 18 months to integrate an entirely new product into the VA’s infrastructure. Specifically, VA teams will require training in the deployment and use of any product other than BHCO, new products will need to adapt to VA infrastructure limitations, and VA will need to analyze and configure infrastructure security to operate in compliance with VA security standards.

Other SaaS solutions will need components integrated with and deployed to on-premise infrastructure to allow access to VA healthcare systems. Since BHCO is the successor product to the existing software, the BHCO SaaS offering provides a seamless transition path from TSCO software, which is approaching end of life. As a successor product, BHCO maintains compatibility with existing data structures and collection agents, facilitating smooth integration. Importantly, BHCO can ingest historical performance data previously collected by TSCO, preserving valuable context for system performance trend forecasting and enhancing predictive analysis accuracy. If the Government was to use a different brand software, it could take over four years to get a new solution fully functional at the current operational level.

In summary, VA cannot simply uninstall BMC software and install a different vendor’s product as the integration of the BMC software is extensive throughout the enterprise.

Currently, there isn’t another software solution, other than BHCO, that will integrate with the existing VA IT infrastructure. Replacing TSCO with BHCO will allow re-use of existing collection mechanisms and agents already deployed to operating VA IT systems. Additionally, due to the proprietary nature of the software, maintenance support and professional services required for transition from TSCO to BHCO can only be provided by BMC. Only BMC BHCO can satisfy all of the Government’s requirements without significantly impacting VA’s ability to perform its mission to serve Veterans, their families, caregivers, and survivors. Failure to procure the brand name BMC software will result in a lack of insight into pending IT system capacity issues which would render electronic health records, medication scripts, care referrals, and clinical reminders unavailable to providers resulting in potential harm to patients, missed clinical appointments and sub-standard care. Additionally, an inability to perform detailed root cause analysis on capacity related system failures could lead to repeated reoccurrences of the same problem with similar consequences.

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 Government's requirements. However, the undersigned VA technical representative determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for brand name BHCO SaaS, as well as support services for BHCO. In accordance with FAR 16.505(a)(4)(iii)(A)(1), this justification will be provided with the solicitation to all appropriate NASA SEWP V GWAC holders. Furthermore, in accordance with FAR 5.301, 16.505(b)(2)(ii)(D), and 16.505(a)(4)(iii), the award notice for this action will be synopsized on the Contract 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 future actions to be competed.

8. Market Research: The Government’s technical experts conducted internet-based market research in March of 2024 by reviewing websites of other similar software products. The specific software products reviewed included Lenovo Capacity Planner, Idera Uptime, Syncsort Capacity Management, Amazon AWS CloudWatch and HPE Performance Analysis Tool. Based on reviews of these products, the Government’s technical experts determined that none of these products can meet the Government’s functional, interoperability or compatibility requirements. Below are the findings:

Lenovo Capacity Planner is a product oriented toward data center infrastructure management. Its primary focus is on power consumption and physical rack space. It does not collect system performance metrics, which is a core CPE functional requirement.

Idera Uptime is a product focused on performance monitoring along the lines of Dynatrace. It does not provide a capacity planning capability which is a core CPE functional requirement.

Syncsort Capacity Management is a capacity planning and forecasting tool. It is not oriented towards the type of computing environments of interest to CPE, rather, it is oriented towards Mainframe computing environments.

Amazon AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring tool for use within Amazon AWS environments. It does not address the coverage needed by CPE (both cloud and on-premises). It does not provide capacity planning.

Micro Focus HPE Performance Center Tool provides application performance testing. It does not address systemic performance analysis. It is not a capacity planning tool.

Additionally, none of these other products can offer the compatibility with CPE’s existing installation of BMC software due to the proprietary nature of BMC’s source code.

Additionally, CPE’s Capacity and Performance Subject Matter Experts regularly review industry trade publications and conduct internet research to ascertain if any other brand name software is available.

In July 2024, a Request for Information (RFI) was submitted on both NASA SEWP V GWAC and System for Award Management (SAM) to obtain a broad survey of the marketplace. In the RFI, the Government listed salient characteristics, requesting brand name or equal solutions. The market research resulted in BMC BHCO SaaS being the only product that could meet all of the Government’s requirement. Four resellers responded to the RFI posted on the NASA SEWP V GWAC. Each reseller proposed BMC’s BHCO product and services. No other product or manufacturer was proposed.

Five resellers responded to the RFI posted on SAM.gov. None of the responses was found to be capable, as none met the Government’s minimum requirements as set forth in the RFI. Based on all of these market research efforts, the Government’s technical experts have determined that only the BHCO SaaS and BMC support services can meet all of VA’s needs. Several BMC resellers, to include Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Businesses, were identified; thus, limited competition is available among BMC resellers. As a result of the aforementioned market research, VA intends to issue a Request for Quotation, as a SDVOSB set-aside on the NASA SEWP V GWAC.

9. Other Facts: N/A

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.

Date

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 anticipated competition and discounts among multiple value-added resellers of the required brand name (BMC) Helix Continuous Optimization (BHCO) Software as a Service (SaaS), professional services and support described herein. Additionally, further price analysis of quotes received will be conducted to determine fair and reasonable price. Finally, pricing of products awarded under NASA SEWP V GWAC have already been determined to be fair and reasonable

Contracting Officer

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

Contracting Officer