Institute-wide license for MATLAB software

National Cancer Institute (NCI), Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) seeks to procure an Institute-wide license for MATLAB software, on a sole source basis, from MathWorks of 3 Apple Hill Drive,Natick, MA 01760-2098.

This acquisition will be processed under FAR Part 12 – Acquisition for Commercial Items and will be made pursuant to the authority in FAR 13.106-1 (b)(1)(i) using simplified acquisition procedures for commercial acquisitions.  The North American Industry Classification System code is 541511 and the business size standard is $30.0M.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Cancer Institute (NCI), Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT), Office of the CIO (OCIO) requires an annual institute wide subscription to the MATLAB software by MathWorks for use in ongoing research and scientific computing activities.

BACKGROUND

MATLab is a programming and numeric computing environment used by many scientific staff across NCI. Currently, staff purchase and manage their licenses individually, in a decentralized fashion across the institute, creating significant administrative burden on top of the initial license purchase costs. The purchase of an Institute-Wide License (IWL) will allow for consolidation of all these distributed purchases, resulting in reduced administrative burden while also increasing the number of features available to users.

NCI has been using MATLAB licenses (from MathWorks) to support various research across the institute as a programming environment for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization, and numeric computation, supporting many areas of the institute including the optical microscopy core, the Laboratory of Pathology, the Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics, and many more. One of the key values of MATLAB is that it is a sort of lingua franca among some of NCI's data intensive scientists and their collaborators both inside and outside the institute and from across academia. Common usage of the language, compiled binaries, and identical MATLAB toolboxes (including for parallel computing, image processing, curve fitting, optimization, statistics and machine learning, and many others) allows these collaborators to share code and executables both between their desktop computer environments and on cloud or cluster compute environments. The continued development (or use) of these highly specialized algorithms / modules requires these licenses to remain with the original source MathWorks.

Award to any other source would introduce unacceptable technical risks to the research because investigators would no longer be able to share identical code and replicate each other's analyses, causing unacceptable delays due to re-coding in other languages, and cause substantial duplication of cost to the Government to rework the algorithms / modules that is not expected to be recovered through competition. The intended contract will consolidate several existing software licenses for MathWorks products under a single institutional license. MathWorks is currently the sole source for Institute-Wide Licenses in North America. In addition, MathWorks is the sole known provider of Software Maintenance Service for MathWorks products in North America.

OBJECTIVE

The intent is to purchase an Institute Wide License (IWL) of MATLAB, a programming language and numeric computing environment for analytical use by NCI’s data-intensive scientists, primarily in the Intramural program. The purchase is for one year of an annually renewable IWL which will provide license usage for all NCI staff, including full time and temporary staff (such as summer interns or fellows), which they may use on personal computers, shared cluster computers or on cloud compute instances.  In addition to the core MATLAB software, the IWL will provide access to the full suite of MATLAB Toolboxes as well as the training library for the software.

SCOPE

The contractor shall provide an institute wide license (IWL) of the MATLAB software by MathWorks.

• The IWL shall support unlimited users by NCI.
• All users shall have access to all MATLab toolboxes.

• Software upgrades and support included.
• Telephone, Email, and Web based technical support included.

TYPE OF ORDER

This is a firm fixed price purchase order for severable services.

PERIOD OF PERFORMANCE

The base period of performance shall be for 12 months with two 12-month option periods.

Base Period: 09/16/2022 – 09/15/2023

Option Period 1: 09/16/2023 – 09/15/2024

Option Period 2: 09/06/2024 – 09/16/2025

PLACE OF PERFORMANCE

 Services shall be provided at the Contractor’s facility unless onsite response is needed to continue operations. The end user address is:

National Cancer Institute, (NCI)

Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT)

9609 Medical Center Drive,

Rockville, MD 20850

REPORT(S)/DELIVERABLES AND DELIVERY SCHEDULE

Pursuant to FAR clause 52.212-4, all work described in the SOW to be delivered under this contract is subject to final inspection and acceptance by an authorized representative of the Government. The authorized representative of the Government is the Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR), who is responsible for inspection and acceptance of all services, materials, or supplies to be provided by the Contractor.

All services delivered to the COR will be deemed to have been accepted 30 calendar days after date of delivery, except as otherwise specified in this task order, if written approval or disapproval has not been given within such period.  The COR’s approval or revision to the services delivered shall be within the general scope of work stated in this task order.

COR:  TBD AT AWARD

PAYMENT

Payment shall be made quarterly, in arears. Payment authorization requires submission and approval of invoices to the TPOC and NIH OFM, in accordance with the attached payment provisions listed below:

The following clause is applicable to all Purchase Orders, Task or Delivery Orders, and Blanket

Purchase Agreement (BPA) Calls: PROMPT PAYMENT (JUL 2017) FAR 52.232-25.

This notice is not a request for competitive quotation. However, if any interested party, especially small business believes it can meet the above requirement, it may submit a capability statement for the Government to consider. The response and any other information furnished must be in writing and must contain material in sufficient detail to allow NCI to determine if the party can perform the requirement.  Responses must be received in the contracting office by 12:00 PM ET, on August 12, 2022.  All responses and questions must be via email to Miguel Diaz, Contracting Officer at miguel.diaz@nih.gov.  A determination by the Government not to compete this proposed requirement based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement.  In order to receive an award, contractors must be registered and have valid certification through SAM.GOV and have Representations and Certifications filled out. Reference: 75N91022Q00163 on all correspondence.