Notice of Intent to Sole Source G Suite - FAR 13

THIS IS NOT A REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL OR QUOTES - THIS IS A NOTICE OF THE GOVERNMENT'S INTENT TO ISSUE A SOLE SOURCE AWARD TO GOOGLE, INC FOR G SUITE SOFTWARE LICENSES The Department of Defense (DoD), Washington Headquarters Services, Acquisition Directorate (WHS/AD), on behalf of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) intends to award a sole source contract pursuant to the requirements of FAR 13.106-1(b)(1) - soliciting from a single source, for purchases not exceeding the simplified acquisition threshold. WHS/AD intends to issue this sole source contract to Google, Inc. located at 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. The anticipated Period of Performance for 250 G Suite license subscriptions are 12 months from the date of contract award with three 12-month option periods for sustainment of the 250 base quantity. The total estimated value of this procurement is approximately $120K over a potential 4 year period. Current Google G Suite licenses expire on July 31, 2017. This contract will address the requirements of DDS to continue its Google G Suite license subscriptions in support of its operational mission. Based on the Government's current market research, including input from numerous technical advisors, G Suite meets the aforementioned requirements. G Suite is a leading private-sector cloud-based app portfolio with recognizable components including Google Drive and Gmail. The service provides unlimited cloud storage on its plans for government and business, and allows for a collaborative work style that suits DDS's needs. When Based on the Government's current market research, including input from numerous technical advisors, G Suite meets the aforementioned requirements. G Suite is a leading private-sector cloud-based app portfolio with recognizable components including Google Drive and Gmail. The service provides unlimited cloud storage on its plans for government and business, and allows for a collaborative work style that suits DDS's needs. When working on projects, DDS teams require and intimate understanding of others' progress and due to the intensity of their tasks, necessitate a method to obtain up-to-date information about their co-workers' progress. Google's online and cloud functionality allows simultaneous collaboration and instant syncing, preventing the time drain resulting from constant updates. The industry consensus is that G Suite's collaboration focus and features are unrivaled, due to this being the central focus during the development of the portfolio. Not only are the advantages collaborative, but they G Suite is on net a better investment, providing unlimited storage with its Business plan as opposed to Microsoft 365's charges to upgrade storage. Especially given DDS's continuing expansion and rapid onboarding, any data limitations, while currently not a significant hindrance, would be magnified in coming years. G Suite also boasts significant third-party app integration, more so than Microsoft 365. Slack, another app used by the team and essential to communication and collaboration, is already G Suite-integrated and is not as equally compatible with Microsoft 365. In addition, DDS's previous use of GSuite over the previous year means that a data transition to any other service would cost significant time and effort and hinder productivity for an undetermined amount of time. Emails, specifically, would be unable to be recovered. This cost is especially harmful given DDS's rapidfire work-style which focuses on high-impact short-term projects, in which even several days are crucial to project exploration micro-sprints, discovery sprints, and even a several month-long project, in which a single week can account for anywhere from 5% to 10% of all work time. For obvious reasons, the transfer cost alone should be heavily weighed. To the consideration of other alternatives, Apple's iWork is the closest to G Suite and Microsoft 356 and is yet another tool structured for both online and offline cooperation. Apple's suite of products includes 3 services, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, with paid iCloud storage and online access with an iCloud account. However, these products do not include an email account, which not only presents the issue of either securing a new email account or purchasing yet another subscription service like Microsoft 365's low-level plan or reverting back to the DoD's Microsoft Outlook, which in DDS's experience has hampered productivity, undermined its culture-change objectives in introducing private sector practices to DoD issues, and also limited accessibility due to the lack of mobile access to DoD emails. In addition, the transfer cost would still exist. Thus, to carry out its mission, DDS requires a quick, rapid, and collaborative environment that maximizes productivity in its work; internal and external research shows that G Suite's tools most closely align with those priorities. This notice of intent is NOT a request for proposals or quotations. Requests for copies of a solicitation in response to this notice will not be honored or acknowledged. A determination by the Government not to compete this proposed action based upon responses to this notice is solely within the discretion of the Government. Information received will be considered solely for the purpose of determining whether conducting a future competitive procurement is in the best interest of the Government. Re-sellers of Google GSuite software (Small Businesses) should indicate this status by reply. Interested parties affiliated with similar products may identify their interest and capability by responding to this Notice of Intent no later than 11:00AM Eastern Time, 15 July 2017 by email to chanda.r.brooks.civ@mail.mil; no telephone communications will be entertained. The subject line in the email shall state "Response to Notice of Intent - Slack Software License." All information submitted should support the vendor's capability to provide a tool meeting the requirement detailed above highlighting a point for point comparison relative to functionality with the G Suite tool currently in use. The primary North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code is 511210 Software Publishers.