USDA STRATUS Program Pre-Solicitation Notice

Title

USDA STRATUS Cloud BOA Sources Sought Notice for Pool 3 SaaS Providers/Resellers.

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 and 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 USDA Cloud BOA. 

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.

Currently, the most-used SaaS by USDA include products from Salesforce, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Appian, Akamai, Anitian, Redhat, Puppet, Sonarqube, Cohesity, NetApp, and FEITH.

Pool 3 evaluation approach

An advisory down select source selection is being considered for Pool 3, with the following notional steps:

1. Offerors submit brief capability statements, where they respond to specific questions regarding how they:
   1. Manage and provide data usage rights to USDA stakeholders and end-users.
   2. Manage and make licenses and usage understandable, manageable, and agreeable to USDA stakeholders and end-users.
   3. Commit to pricing at the BOA level to ensure best value pricing at the Task Order level.
   4. Provide a breadth of SaaS products and are able to add new SaaS to their offerings.
2. Capability statements are evaluated against the four areas above.
3. An advisory notification is provided to let offerors know if they are considered highly competitive for award.
4. Highly competitive offerors are invited to participate in a demonstration of their ability to provide competitively priced SaaS in response to a specific scenario.
5. Pool 3 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 3 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. Provide feedback on what a successful evaluation would look like. Should USDA use one or multiple phases? Firm or advisory down-selects? Are the four evaluation areas above meaningful to differentiate between SaaS providers/resellers? What do you suggest in place of or in addition to these four?
3. What demonstration would you recommend as most helpful for USDA to select contractors for this requirement?
4. What contracting best practices (e.g. pricing structures, contract types, performance metrics, incentives, etc.) do you recommend for this requirement?
5. Describe your corporate experience in managing SaaS contracts, including identifying relevant contracts where you have been a prime contractor providing SaaS, including;
   1. Name of Agency
   2. Contract Name and number
   3. Contract value
   4. Period of performance
   5. Description of SaaS available on contract
   6. Description of SaaS actually provided – quantify dollar value, # of licenses, etc.

Submission Information

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

Christine Wallace, Contracting Officer

christine.wallace@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.

Industry feedback is greatly appreciated!