Redacted JA SSH Tectia_Redacted.pdf

Control Number: VA-22-00001446

JUSTIFICATION

FOR AN EXCEPTION TO FAIR OPPORTUNITY\

1. Contracting Activity: Department of Veterans Affairs

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 to be issued under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for the brand name Secure Shell (SSH) Tectia software maintenance renewal.

3. Description of Supplies or Services: The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Office of Information Technology (OI&T), Service Delivery and Engineering (SDE), Infrastructure Operations (IO) requires brand name Secure Shell (SSH) Communications Security Tectia software maintenance. The software maintenance will consist of software upgrades and updates to include major releases, point releases, service releases and security releases of applicable software on a quarterly basis and/or within 48 hours in cases in which a high-risk vulnerability fix becomes available.

These software licenses and updates are necessary for IO to be able to operate successfully. The maintenance is required to ensure the software remains operational.

The period of performance is a 12-month base period and four 12-month option periods.

The total estimated value of the proposed action, including Option Periods, is

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 market research as described in section eight of this justification, , it was determined that limited competition is available among authorized resellers for the SSH Tectia software maintenance support. VA previously acquired SSH Communications Security Tectia perpetual license and deployed the proprietary software solutions from SSH in 2017.

Only SSH Tectia software maintenance support can meet the Governments’ requirements. The IO infrastructure is based on existing SSH Tectia software and VA requires support compatible with the existing infrastructure protocols and functionality for continued operational availability. Only SSH Tectia or an authorized reseller can provide the necessary software updates, because of the propriety source code required to develop and implement software updates. No other source is capable of providing the required software maintenance that meets VA’s unique functional requirements. In addition, a prior implementation of SSH Tectia software

Control Number VA-22-00001446 licenses already exists in IO. Acquisition of a different product, even if another one existed with qualifications that met VA’s stated functional needs, would require multiple support costs if the SSH Tectia software licenses were abandoned in favor of a different product including new software licenses. No other license is compatible with or interoperable with the existing SSH Tectia proprietary database structures, protocols, and software application programming interfaces.

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, it was determined that limited competition is viable among resellers for the brand name acquisition. In accordance with FAR 5.301 and 16.505(b)(2), notice of award of this action will be synopsized on the beta.sam.gov website within 14 days of award and this justification will be made publicly available. This justification shall also be posted with the solicitation on the NASA SEWP V GWAC website for review by prospective offerors.

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 completed.

8. Market Research: The Government’s technical experts conducted market research in March 2021 to ascertain the ability of any other source, besides SSH Tectia or an authorized reseller, to provide the aforementioned maintenance and support. The research consisted of reviewing various software license maintenance plans including IBM/Sterling Connect and Attachmate FileXpress offered on the NASA SEWP V GWAC. Although other vendors possess similar capabilities, only SSH Tectia or an authorized reseller can meet the Government’s requirements because the source code required to perform the software updates is proprietary, as SSH Tectia resellers are the only source capable of providing the required maintenance and upgrades for SSH Tectia software. No other brand of software maintenance has the capability of developing and issuing software updates and fixes for SSH Tectia software necessary to support IO’s requirements. In addition, all of the software maintenance products researched were unable to meet the functional requirements as stated in paragraph 5 of this justification.

On June 2, 2021 additional market research was conducted by the Contract Specialist by utilizing the NASA SEWP V Provider Lookup tool to determine whether any of the required brand name products were available from any NASA SEWP V Government Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) holders. A search was conducted using the keyword “Tectia” and the results identified 45 contract holders that are resellers of the brand name Tectia. Of these 45 resellers, seven are verified Service- Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Businesses (SDVOSBs), eight are large businesses, and 37 are small businesses. Furthermore, NASA SEWP has a dynamic catalog where line items can be added based on customer requests provided that the required item or

Control Number VA-22-00001446 service is within the scope of the NASA SEWP V contract suite and therefore additional competition may be achieved.

Based on the results of the review set forth above, there is reasonable expectation that two or more SDVOSBs will be able to provide the required support. Therefore, given that there is a reasonable expectation of competition between at least two capable SDVOSBs, it has been determined by the Contracting Officer that the subject RFQ will be released as a SDVOSB set-aside under the existing NASA SEWP V contract vehicle, under the Value-Added Reseller NAICS code 541519.

9. Other Facts: None.