USDA STRATUS Program Pre-Solicitation Notice

Title

USDA STRATUS Cloud BOA Sources Sought Notice for Pool 2 Integration and Development

Background

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is contemplating issuing a department-wide Cloud Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) “STRATUS” to obtain rapid access to hyperscale cloud service providers, integration & development service providers, and SaaS providers/resellers.

The USDA Digital Infrastructure Services Center (DISC) https://www.usda.gov/disc is the program owner. DISC provides enterprise-wide IT services to USDA Mission Area (MA) (see https://www.usda.gov/our-agency/about-usda/mission-areas) customers as well as external Federal customers, and will provide governance and technical guidance on the use of the STRATUS BOAs.

The USDA STRATUS BOA is envisioned as consisting of three pools of services and vendors:

Pool 1: Hyperscale Cloud Service Providers (CSP)

Pool 2: Integration and Development

Pool 3: SaaS providers/resellers

Where each pool will have multiple awardees.

Pool 2 services are expected to include application and other cloud related development, application and infrastructure sustainment and maintenance, security management and managed services.

Pool 2 evaluation approach

An advisory down select source selection is being considered for Pool 2, with the following notional steps:

1. Offerors submit brief capability statements, consisting of prior experience information and abstracts of their approach to addressing a problem statement. There are anticipated to be 3 problem statement focus areas (application development, application sustainment, managed service) with a problem statement for each. Offerors can choose to respond to 1, 2, or 3 of the problem statements, and if responding to more than 1, must indicate their preferred response focus area.
2. Capability statements are evaluated on the proposed solutions and approaches and level of confidence of offeror capability to deliver the solution.
3. An assessment of the competitive field of offerors is completed for each problem statement focus area.
   1. Offerors with credible responses in more than 1 focus area may be rated more highly competitive.
4. An advisory notification is provided to let offerors know if they are considered highly competitive for an award.
5. Highly competitive offerors are invited to submit pricing information, and participate in a demonstration of their ability to execute their proposed solution in one of the three focus areas. The focus area of the demonstration will be selected by USDA, based on the offeror submitted preference (if they responded to more than 1 focus area), and USDA’s assessment of the depth of highly rated offerors in each focus area.
6. Pool 2 BOAs are awarded to a group of the most highly competitive offerors.

Requested Information

Interested parties are requested to respond to the following, regarding Pool 2 as described above:

1. What is your company information: company name, address, UEI, point of contact, website, business size by 5 year average revenue and headcount, and any other socioeconomic designations.
2. What demonstration would you recommend as most helpful for USDA to select contractors for this requirement?
3. What contracting best practices (e.g. pricing structures, contract types, performance metrics, incentives, etc.) do you recommend for this requirement?
4. Describe your corporate experience in providing cloud-related Integration and Development, including identifying relevant contracts where you have been a prime contractor, including;
   1. Name of Agency
   2. Contract Name and number
   3. Contract value
   4. Period of performance
   5. Description of services provided

Submission Information

Please submit responses to this sources sought notice by email to:

Emily Strunk, Contracting Officer

emily.strunk@usda.gov

The deadline for submissions is Thursday, May 4, 2023, NLT 5:00 PM EDT.

Please limit your response to no more than 6 single sided pages, with a minimum 11 point font (10 point font in tables or exhibits), minimum single-spaced.

Notes

1. This is a sources sought notice and is not a request for proposals.
2. No awards will be made as a result of this notice.
3. Responses will be used to inform the USDA acquisition strategy.
4. Some respondents may be invited to one-on-one information exchanges with USDA.
5. Not all respondents, and possibly no respondents, will be invited to one-on-one information exchanges with USDA.
6. Not responding to this sources sought notice does not preclude participation in any future RFP, if any is issued.
7. This is a new contract vehicle. Similar services are currently obtained using a variety of contract vehicles, a listing of which will not be provided.
8. Industry feedback is greatly appreciated!