EXELIS Interative Data Language (IDL) and Environment for Visualizing Images (ENVI) Image Analysis software Support

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Eastern Region Acquisitions Division-Kansas City office intends to negotiate, on a sole source basis, under the authority of FAR 13.106-1(b)(1), with Exelis Visual Information Solutions, Inc., a subsidiary of Harris Corporation in Boulder CO, for 35 EXELIS Interactive Data Language (IDL) and Environment for Visualizing Images (ENVI) image analysis software licenses for the National Water Center (NWC) located in Chanhassen, MN. Service will be for a base year and four 1-year option periods. A Sources Sought notice was posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website on June 8, 2016 and closed on June 17, 2016. No responses were received. Sole Source Justification ENVI is a state of the art image processing system designed to provide comprehensive image processing, exploitation and analysis of satellite and airborne remote sensing data. The NWC Chanhassen location relies solely upon this software for satellite data image processing and must renew license maintenance agreements in order to support its operations and provide guidance products and services to the NWS field offices. The NWC Chanhassen location relies on IDL as a modeling framework programming language and must renew license maintenance agreements in order to sustain operational support of NWS forecast offices by providing snow related guidance products and services. It is cost, operations, and human resource prohibitive to use software other than IDl and ENVI. Several thousand lines of IDL based software would have to be refactored in order to maintain an operational posture and the NWC Chanhassen location image processing staff would require retraining if ENVI were replaced by another product. Per a letter received from Harris Corporation, they are the exclusive manufacturer, developer, direct sales channel and distributor for IDL and ENVI software in the United States. They have no authorized resellers.