Notice of Intent to Sole Source: License Renewal for ANSYS GRANTA MI

The Office of Acquisition and Agreements Management (OAAM), Acquisition Management Division (AMD), of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on behalf of NIST/Center for Automotive Lightweighting (NCAL), intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with ANSYS, Inc (located at 2600 ANSYS Dr., Canonsburg, PA, 15317-0404), for renewed licensing agreements, including software maintenance, for the data management system (DMS) using ANSYS GRANTA MI software.

The NIST/Center for Automotive Lightweighting (NCAL)  develops  measurement methodology, standards and analysis, necessary for the U.S. auto industry and base metal suppliers to transition to advanced lightweight materials for auto body components, without wasteful trial-and-error development cycles, and successfully transfers this technology to NIST’s customers in industry.

To meet mission requirements, NCAL utilizes a data management system using ANSYS GRANTA MI software. NCAL must renew licenses for this data management system to continue to provide a single location where data and metadata, can be housed in a unified environment where the relationships between data (temporal, spatial, dependencies, etc.) can be clearly documented, and mechanisms to import and export data from this DMS are supported.

The Contractor shall provide licenses, including software maintenance. The period of performance shall be for a one-year base period and four one-year option periods.  

The sole source determination is based on the following:

•  The data management system (DMS) uses ANSYS GRANTA MI software. The software was procured (competitively), in September of 2015, from Granta Design. ANSYS Inc. acquired Granta Design in early 2019. ANSYS owns all rights to the DMS software and is the sole manufacturer of Granta MI products. While ANSYS uses resellers to sell certain pieces of its software products under certain conditions, the DMS is only available through ANSYS directly.
• NIST does not intend to, nor is the budget available, to purchase new software.  The financial investment made relevant to the ANSYS GRANTA MI software exceeds $650,000.00.  Duplication of cost and effort for a different software product is not in the best interest of the Government.
• The ANSYS/Granta MI product has its own structure that is proprietary. Use of another software product would result in data compatibility issues.  Such issues would mean that the experimental and computational efforts over the past five plus years would be inaccessible.

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code for this acquisition is 511210 and the small business size standard is $41.5 M.

No solicitation package will be issued. This notice of intent is not a request for competitive quotations; however, responses received by 1:00pm EST on April 28, 2021, will be considered by the Government.

A determination by the Government not to compete the proposed acquisition based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will normally be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether to conduct a competitive procurement.