This serves as a “Notice of Intent” to award a sole source task order for Gentran EDI product suite. under the NIH ECS II contract, pursuant to FAR 16.5 (exception to Fair Opportunity). The General Services Administration Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) has a requirement to establish an ancillary environment (development/test/production tiers) for translation software to process EDI transactions using a product that is scalable to handle the demands of both our internal and external customers across the continental United States. The system must be capable of ensuring secure transactions and to be expandable to process XML capabilities. The Gentran product manufactured by Sterling Commerce was originally purchased in 1995, and currently supports the existing environment. Since the original installation in 1995 (ten years ago) the need to add an ancillary environment (development/test/production tiers) has been established on the basis of disaster/ recovery planning. The current environment consists of only one production machine—a single point of failure. In the event of a catastrophe, the Government would experience severe hardships trying to recover financial transaction without a backup, mirrored environment. Therefore a mirrored environment is required. Since the Gentran product suite is already in-house and has been for over 10 years, it is necessary to continue using the existing product suite. That is, the Office of the Chief Information Officer has already determined that the Gentran product suite meets current operating needs, and there is no requirement to incur additional costs to convert to a new environment. Substitution of Gentran products with an alternative product would defeat the purpose of establishing a mirrored (exact duplicate) environment. Substitution would als jeopardize interoperability and compatibility efforts within the agency and impair activities from meeting their current mission requirements. There are literally thousands of programmer hours invested in the current environment. The cost of trying to replace an entire EDI/EC translation software package would be far more costly and incur unnecessary risk at this time. It is essential that the development/test/production environment mirror the current environment that has been in operation for 10 years. All interested parties may communicate concerns, or direct any questions concerning this acquisition to Holly Carr 202-329-7250, email:
[email protected]. This notice of intent is not a request for proposals, nor a solicitation for offers.