TAC-21-56639 Enterprise Cloud Fax (ECFax) Managed Service
Page 8 of 8
Request for Information
TAC-21-56639
Enterprise Cloud Fax (ECFax) Service
This is a Request for Information (RFI) only issued for conducting market research and eliciting industry s input as to the Government s requirement. Accordingly, this RFI constitutes neither a Request for Quote (RFQ) nor a guarantee that one will be issued by the Government in the future; furthermore, it does not commit the Government to contract for any services described herein. Do not submit a Quote/Proposal. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is not, at this time, seeking proposals or quotes, and therefore, will not accept, review, or evaluate unsolicited proposals or quotes received in response hereto. This notice is not to be construed as a commitment on the part of the Government to award a contract/order, nor does the Government intend to pay for any information submitted because of this request. The Government does not reimburse respondents for any costs associated with the submission of the information being requested or, reimburse expenses incurred for responses to this RFI. The information provided may be used by VA in developing its acquisition strategy and Performance Work Statement (PWS). Not responding to this RFI does not preclude participation in any future RFQ, if issued. Any information submitted by respondents to this RFI is strictly voluntary; however, any information received shall become the property of the Government and will not be returned to the respondent. Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted, or competition sensitive information contained in their response. This is a request for information and does not obligate the Government in any way, nor does it commit the Government to any specific course of action.
Be advised that set-aside decisions may be made based on the information provided in response to this RFI. Responses should be as complete and informative as possible.
Background:
VA is in a process of migrating from the slow and costly manual/semi-automated faxing processes to multiple vendor electronic faxing solutions. Across VA, multiple stove-pipe solutions exist, and additional requirements are being contracted locally, resulting in inefficient implementation and sustainment costs. In addition, with the federal Governments drive towards cloud first and cloud smart strategies this represents a critical opportunity to improve and simplify a vital VA communications requirement while simultaneously reducing the physical footprint and capital expenditures cost to VA.
At this time, there are multiple faxing vendor services locally configured and implemented across VA. A centralized managed cloud hosted faxing service will allow for increased efficiency and security, thus decreasing the time and cost associated with VA staff manually processing documents and support new operational requirements.
Scope of Work:
VA requires a full-service provider to implement and manage a Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) cloud-based, scalable, secure digital fax/data transfer service, with the application to be fully hosted in a vendor/partner Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certified facility. For the purposes of this RFI a fax is a single transmission or reception with a session that may consist of multiple pages with a cover sheet.
The managed Enterprise Cloud Fax (ECFax) service shall provide VA the ability to send and receive secure fax documents electronically, exponentially improving the security and efficiency of faxing services within VA. VA sites requiring a managed ECFax service shall be able to connect to the cloud-based system, streamlining the request process, and reducing the implementation time. Sites with existing faxing services will migrate to the managed ECFax service with support from the ECFax provider. Outside parties (Veteran or other stakeholders) shall have the ability to send faxes in secure manner which the managed ECFax service will capture and route to the correct VA office, process, or staff member. Similarly, VA shall have the ability to send outbound faxes without the need to print, timestamp, and scan prior to sending a document. This shall include the capture and transmission of data from various VA health applications such as Veterans Health Information System and Technology Architecture (VistA), Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS), and future Electronic Health Record system provided by Cerner Corporation via the use of Application Programming Interface (API).
The Contractor shall provide the managed infrastructure services on a 24 hour per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year basis.
VA s faxing solution(s) currently operate on multiple different platforms with a wide array of capabilities with various levels of business process integration. The scope of this effort shall provide a managed cloud hosted faxing service that meets the collective needs of all VA Administrations, Offices, and locations.
VA s goal is to transition all of its faxing solutions to the managed ECFax service within five years after award of the base contract. The current faxing services environment is highly diversified, from small, medium, and large geographically redundant enterprise-level faxing solution supporting all VA administrations and business offices. Transition of existing faxing services shall be in a phased approach, beginning with a small facility/organization up to and including whole administrations dependent on vendor capability. As new faxing requirements are requested, the Contractor shall implement these new requirements through the managed ECFax service simultaneous with ongoing migration activities.
Under the managed ECFax services described within this RFI, the entire solution (or portions described below) would be entirely owned by the provider including the application infrastructure, code updates, management, change, and other necessary practices with the exception of the data. The Government would engage services strictly through outcome-based Service Level Agreements (SLA) and rendering of business capabilities presented to the provider.
The Contractor shall provide all management, transportation, equipment, tools, materials, service-related equipment (SRE), supplies, installation, supervision, engineering, maintenance, testing, and services necessary to make the services, and features fully operational and perform all the tasks associated with providing an enterprise-wide managed cloud faxing service. The managed ECFax service shall include ongoing responsibility for 24-hour monitoring, managing and/or problem resolution. The Contractor shall be bound by the SLAs that state the performance and quality metrics of their relationship. The managed ECFax service shall be capable of supporting transition of the entire VA enterprise.
Managed Enterprise Cloud Fax Capabilities shall include all the capabilities and features as defined in the attached draft PWS.
Responses:
Provide the additional following information in your response:
Provide Company Information:
Company Name
CAGE/DUNS Number under which the company is registered in SAM/VetBiz.gov
Company Address
Point of contact name
Telephone number
Email address
**Do not submit general capability statements, marketing materials, or other nonspecific information. **
Questions: VA seeks to understand the following in your response:
Describe your current solution Architecture and how it compares to the functional requirements noted in this RFI and draft PWS. List all technical and security standards your solution employs.
Provide a summary of your technical capability and expertise to execute Scaled Agile Framework management methodologies to meet the requirements. If appropriate, explain why this methodology should not be applied to contract execution.
If you currently have a commercial cloud hosted ECFax capability is it certified at FedRAMP Moderate?
If your solution is not FedRAMP certified would you be willing to pursue that certification if VA is willing to sponsor the service.
Has your commercial solution ever received an Authority to Operate (ATO) from any Government Agency and if so, which agency?
Does your product store and transmit sensitive information using security mechanisms that meet Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 criteria? Describe the overall security features of your solution in relationship to this RFI and draft PWS. Discuss details on how data is protected in transit and at rest, and from any cyber vulnerability or attacks, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, malware, spoofing, spams, and viruses.
Describe your ability to temporally store faxed documents in the event of failure of transmission or receiving due to operational system issues.
Describe the disaster recovery/system failure capabilities of your solution.
Does your solution integrate with email applications such as Microsoft (MS) Outlook right out of the box? If so, which applications and versions.
Are their additional software requirements to implement the solution across VA including augmentations that may be required for currently existing multifunctional devices (fax, printer, scanner)? Include a vendor list of devices not requiring changes as applicable.
Is the solution "agentless" or will it require an agent to be installed on each endpoint device? i.e., a desktop application.
Define the scalability of your solution. What are the minimum and maximum capabilities of your ECFax solution. Minimum VA requirements are projected at up 1 million of each inbound and outbound fax (can consist of multiple pages each transmission) per month.
Existing fax number porting capability.
Total Max capability of numbers that can be ported to service
Typical amount of time required to port numbers to service
Max number of numbers your service can port simultaneously
Have the web-based features of your service been certified as 508 Compliant by a Government Agency, or a commercial vendor? If so, please provide the Agency/vendor, Agency/vendor Point of Contact (POC), and date of the certification. Is a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) available?
Does your product support Two Factor Authentication (2FA), including compatibility with Personal Identification Verification (PIV) authentication? If not, would significant development be needed to make it 2FA compliant?
Can your solution meet the System and Organizational Controls (SOC) SOC 2 Type 2 reporting requirements as defined in the PWS?
Describe your solutions ability to integrate with the types of systems as noted in this RFI and draft PWS, (MS Office 365, MS Outlook, VISTA, CPRS, Cerner EHRM) at a minimum using various interface protocols to include APIs.
Describe the processes and services you can provide under your managed service solution. Include who you have implemented such with and the size of the implementation related to the size of VA.
Describe your solutions administration, reporting, and overall management capability, including the ability to roll up support into VA organizational elements and drill down to individual support locations.
What would you consider to be the most difficult technical, operational, or management challenge for a solution of this scope?
Describe the process you use to capture the details of a user s business processes to implement a service like this, so all potential aspects are covered and as accurate as possible.
Are any of the technical requirements or features listed in the draft PWS not typical of an industry standard model for a managed cloud faxing service? If so, which ones? Are there any typical industry features that are missing?
Review the draft PWS and provide comments and recommended changes with a rationale for any desired changes. Line numbers in the Draft PWS may be used as references for specific comments. The Government reserves the right to not make any recommended changes.
Provide a list of any clients that you have successfully implemented and supported a cloud based ECFax service as a prime contractor. Additional information such as capacity, number of business processes supported, and geographical scope with each and as compared to VA size, complexity a faxing volume, should be included as available.
What are your company s processes to satisfy the requirements for adherence to schedule, agility, flexibility, responsiveness, scalability and reliability, service quality and consistency, and continuous improvement?
Provide a rough projected pricing model for your solution.
What standard pricing models for a cloud hosted managed service solution would you provide and why should VA consider it. For example:
Per page?
Enterprise Agreement?
Costs for banded levels of usage?
Per Primary Rate Interface Circuit?
Annualized estimate of the price for a 5-year term assuming use of your FedRAMP Moderate capable facility to establish a fully managed.
Initial operational capability year one base task of 500,000 faxes a month. Include the price to complete items required in the PWS to establish the service, test, evaluate, and achieve an initial operating capability (IOC) within 12 months from award.
Fully Operationally managed
Estimated fully operational Managed Services with a capacity of 10,000,000 faxes per month annualized pricing over five years, related to implementing and managing this service across VA. If all fees are inclusive of service, please state this.
Any Licenses or subscriptions fee.
Number porting fees/sustainment fees
Software maintenance (patches, upgrades etc.).
Implementation support Planning and execution (including site surveys and training).
Non-recurring Software development.
Operations and management of the solution for up to a potential of 1700 VA sites with various business models.
Cloud hosting fees.
Security accreditation support.
Provide intent and ability to meet set-aside requirements for performance of this effort, if applicable
With respect to the subject effort, if you are the Prime or sub-contractor, please describe your teaming arrangement and tasks to be performed by each partner/ team member including the percentage of work each is to perform;
If a small business, what type of small business are you? Are you able to comply with FAR 52.219-6 and 52.219-14 in execution of this effort? For Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB)/Veteran Owned Small Business (VOSB) concerns, are you able to comply with VAAR 852.219-10, VA Notice of Total Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business Set-Aside and with subcontracting limitations in 13 CFR 125.6 in execution of this effort? Indicate whether you will pay more than 50% of the amount paid by the government to firms that are not VIP-listed SDVOSBs/VOSBs. Provide a detailed description of how you intend to comply with VAAR 852.219-10, VA Notice of Total Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business Set-Aside and with subcontracting limitations in 13 CFR 125.6 in execution of this effort. ***Please note the cost of Software/Licenses/Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) may be included in the cost of contracts. Please consider these costs in your response indicating you will, or will not be able to meet the 50% requirement***
Identify existing contract vehicles (e.g. NASA SEWP V GWAC, GSA, etc.) in which you are a contract holder that can be utilized to procure these services.
RFI Response Instructions:
NOTE: The capability package must be clear, concise, and complete. VA is under no obligation to provide feedback to the company, or to contact the company for clarification of any information submitted in response to this RFI.
Submit responses to this RFI by email to Juan Quinones at juan.quinones@va.gov. Please limit responses to no more than 20 pages. Comments related to the draft PWS can constitute up to an additional 10 pages (please reference the specific line in the PWS for all comments). All proprietary/company confidential material shall be clearly marked on every page that contains such. Responses should also include a short summary of your company's business/developments in this area and current deployments with references. Also, please submit the name, phone number, and email address of the lead from your organization.
VA reserves the right to not respond to any or all emails or materials submitted. All VA current requirements identified herein are subject to change at any time.
VA envisions that once RFI responses are reviewed, select responders may be invited to provide a face-to-face or telephonic briefing to VA personnel to answer additional questions with respect to the response given. VA retains sole discretion of whether any post RFI briefings are warranted and which industry partners may be invited to provide additional market research information.
Responses are due to Matthew.Newell@va.gov by November 15, 2019.
Contract Specialist: Matthew Newell
Contracting Officer: Juan Quinones
See attached document: Draft PWS ECFax.
Matthew Newell
Matthew.Newell@va.gov
732-440-9691
Matthew.Newell@va.gov
