SPECIAL NOTICE
D -- Unified Communication Request for Information - Unified Communication RFI Worksheet
- Notice Date
- 9/12/2011
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- NAICS
- 541519
— Other Computer Related Services
- Contracting Office
- Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, 6707 Democracy Blvd., Suite 105, Bethesda, Maryland, 20894, United States
- ZIP Code
- 20894
- Solicitation Number
- NLM-RFI-11-0912-KDM
- Archive Date
- 9/27/2011
- Point of Contact
- Karen Miller, Phone: 301-435-4376
- E-Mail Address
-
kr33@nih.gov
(kr33@nih.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- Unified Communication - RFI Information Unified Communication RFI Worksheet RFI Title: Unified Communications (UC) Request for Information (RFI) Release Date: 9/12/2011 Response Due Date: 9/26/2011 4:00 PM EDT Submit responses to: EnterpriseArchitecture@mail.nih.gov REQUEST FOR INFORMATION NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH Issuing Institute or Center: Center for Information Technology This Request for Information (RFI) is for information and planning purposes only and shall not be construed as either a solicitation or obligation on the part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), its Institutes or Centers. The purpose of this RFI is to help the NIH understand market availability, technical characteristics, and functionality of unified communications tools or products capable of satisfying the technical, functional, and/or operational characteristics described in this RFI. NIH will use this market research information in its evaluation of potential unified communications technologies for addition to the NIH Enterprise Architecture as enterprise standard technologies. NIH welcomes comments from all interested product vendors on each or all of the questions contained in this RFI. NIH does not intend to award a contract on the basis of responses nor otherwise pay for the preparation of any information submitted or NIH's use of such information. Acknowledgment of receipt of responses will not be made, nor will respondents be notified of the NIH's evaluation of the information received. Description of Objective NIH seeks information on available technologies that facilitate and enable unified communications. Description of Environment NIH currently uses a mix of different vendors and technologies to provide communications capabilities to its staff. Some of these capabilities are provided by the local institute or center that the staff member belongs to. Other capabilities are provided centrally by the NIH. These technologies are generally not unified. Technologies of interest to the NIH are capable of providing the following: 1. Voice and telephony 2. Conferencing (Voice, Video and Web Conferencing) 3. Presence / Instant Messaging 4. Email, Voicemail and Unified Messaging The NIH is made up of twenty seven different institutes and centers (ICs) that have their own unified communications requirements. While recognizing that no one technology would be appropriate for the NIH (at this time), we are looking for unified communications technologies that would work well within this diverse environment and be able to integrate well with a wide variety of legacy systems. Description of Evaluation Criteria: In order to support its evaluation and selection of potential solutions for unified communications, the NIH seeks information on available technologies within the unified communications domain. For the purpose of this RFI, the NIH defines the scope of this technical domain as products (equipment, software and services) that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communication methods including Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, e-mail, audioconferencing and Web conferencing, videoconferencing, voice mail, unified messaging (UM), instant messaging (IM), and various forms of mobility. The information gathered through this market research, combined with information gathered through other research and analysis methodologies, will provide the NIH with important decision support information in its evaluation. NIH will base the selection of potential solutions on the following evaluation criteria: • Cost - estimated total cost of ownership (based on market research statistics and independent research opinions). • Existing NIH Installed Base - NIH experience with the technology and the use and adoption of the standard throughout NIH. • Fit with Existing NIH Standards, Technologies, and Systems - any known interoperability issues a potential standard may have with existing technology standards. • Flexibility - the breadth of the standard's applicability to multiple NIH stakeholder classes. • Implementation Effort and Complexity - The level of effort and complexity associated with the implementation of the product in a production environment. • Industrial Installed Base - the use and adoption of the standard throughout industry in general (both commercial and public enterprises). • Maintainability/supportability - the effort and specialized skill sets required to support a technology. • Product Life cycle - evaluates the expected time the product will be in use and supported by the vendor and the ability to maintain currency of its functionality and operation. A longer life cycle is desirable from a training and hardware investment perspective. • Security - the ability and/or effectiveness and fit of the technology within the NIH security environment. • Strategic Value/Features and Functionality -evaluates the breadth of product capabilities beyond the core requirement, and the extent to which these capabilities can be leveraged by NIH to enhance the value of NIH's investment in the product. • Vendor Viability - the health of the product vendor in terms of its stability, projected longevity, and likelihood it will exist in the future to support the product and later versions of the product. It is important to reiterate that this RFI is not intended to gather information needed to address each of the decision criteria above nor all of the technical and functional requirements in the Excel spreadsheets. Received data will be combined with information gathered through other research and analysis methodologies to support NIH's overall evaluation. Request for Information: To support the NIH's market research, the NIH requests responses to the following questions. Please limit your response to no more than 15 pages (not including illustrations) in Microsoft Word format. Please provide your responses directly in this RFI template. Additionally, please complete the Microsoft Excel attachment that accompanies this RFI (responses to the Excel attachment are to be entered directly into the spreadsheets and submitted in Microsoft Excel format). Vendors are not required to enter information against all functional requirements listed. The NIH anticipates that in many cases vendor products will only offer functionality in one or two functional areas, and should therefore only complete the applicable sections. There may be some overlap in the questions in the MS-Word and the MS-Excel documents. However, please complete and submit both. Finally, please attach your product's completed Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) with your response. Submit all three documents - the RFI response in MS-Word format, the functional and technical requirements workbook in MS-Excel format, and VPAT statement - together to EnterpriseArchitecture@mail.nih.gov. All responses must be received by 4:00 PM EDT on Monday, September 26, 2011. General Information 1) Please provide the following: a. Your organization's name b. Your organization's web site c. Contact Name d. Contact Telephone e. Contact E-mail address f. Number of employees in your organization g. Your organization's current annual revenue h. Are the products you are considering included in the GSA Schedule? Are they available on another Government-wide Acquisition Contracts (GWAC) such as National Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC)? 2) To what extent are you limited to conduct business with the Federal Government under the Buy American Act? Product Information 3) Given the definition and scope of this technical domain (i.e., unified communications as defined in the Description of Evaluation Criteria section above), please identify any product(s) or solution(s) you offer that fit within this domain. For each product/solution you identify, please provide the following information as available/applicable: a. Product/solution name b. Date of product's first production release (v1.0, not beta versions) c. Current production version d. Planned product schedule and technology roadmap (i.e. future product enhancements, upgrade cycle of the product, next major release plan) e. Revenue based on product sales f. Number of customers, by private and public sectors, using the version of the product being considered in this RFI g. Please discuss its features, functionality, and capabilities h. List 3rd party partnership products used, if any i. Describe any recent product acquisitions that are part of the proposed suite 4) Please discuss how your product(s) or solution(s) satisfy the evaluation criteria described above. 5) Do you currently have any products, solutions, or implementations at the NIH today? If so, to what extent (e.g., Which Institutes or Centers? Which specific products?). 6) Please indicate the depth and breadth of this product's (these products') usage throughout industry in general (i.e., beyond NIH). How many customers (in terms of organizations) are using this product? In what industries? Costs and Fees Structure 7) Pricing and implementation. a. Provide an overview of the costs and fee structure associated with your solution offerings for a large-scale federal solution. b. Provide specific solution cost information, including software licensing, annual maintenance, discount schedules (if applicable), implementation and deployment costs, including options for agency/enterprise licensing agreements. c. Please explain your pricing model(s) (i.e., license-based, unit-based, usage, etc). d. Does the purchase price include installation? If not, please indicate the cost in dollars and time to install the system and provide training. e. Provide any training and/or certification program fees. f. Provide any documentation fees and media type. 8) What capabilities are included in your basic unified communications product offering(s)? What functionality must be purchased separately? 9) How does your product(s) or solution(s) address scalability when transaction volume or number of users increases? What impact, if any, does scalability (increase or decrease) have on cost? Implementation 10) Please provide a sample implementation plan, including the average time it takes to deploy your product and have a functioning capability. Based on real data, please provide plans for small and large sites. 11) Please describe whether implementation requires consulting services. What type of consulting services do you have available? Describe consulting services required for a successful deployment? 12) Provide details of other reference implementations with other organizations. Please include any relevant federal government implementations. Security and Security Management 13) Please disclose any known security vulnerabilities inherent in your product(s) and current mitigation plans. 14) Does your product include integrated virus and malicious code scanning? 15) What specific features and/or deployment options does the product provide for high availability and fault tolerance? Is this functionality native to the solution or provided by another product? 16) Please describe the security management features available with your product. Services/Support 17) Provide an overview of your professional services/consulting services supporting the implementation of your products. How many of your customers subscribe to your services? 18) What types of support are available for your product? Please check all that apply and give detail: Certification program Code skeletons Commercial Manuals Commercial Support Commercial Training Developer Community Online Help Pluggable API Professional Hosting Professional Services Public forum Public mailing list Test framework Third-party developers and tools User's conference Other Standards Compliance 19) Please describe how your product supports federal government usability and accessibility requirements as described in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. Technical 20) Explain how your solution aligns with the NIH Enterprise Architecture (EA)? http://ea.nih.gov 21) Provide an overview of your solution's architecture and technology components. 22) Describe the software and hardware infrastructure requirements associated with implementation of your product. Include OS platforms supported (i.e., Windows, Mac, Unix). 23) What client-side software is required for the implementation of the tool(s)? 24) Describe how your solution fits in to a larger Unified Communications (UC) framework (both your own and/or a third party). 25) Please describe any load balancing strategies you recommend for product implementation and describe the scalability and reliability benefits that implementation would achieve. What are the practical limits of those recommendations? 26) Provide an overview of how your solution leverages current industry best practices or future trends. 27) List the programming languages for which your product provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). 28) Describe the APIs and functionality your product provides in support of customization. 29) Is your development environment standard or proprietary? 30) Does the product have a software development kit (SDK) for extending? Please describe. 31) Does the product support adapters to common business applications? Native or third-party? Please describe the adapters. 32) Please describe the extent of the product's support for web services. NIH welcomes responses from all individuals and organizations on each or all of these questions. Responses are due, in MS Word format, by 4:00 PM EDT on Monday, September 26, 2011. Responses will not be accepted after this time.
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/HHS/NIH/OAM/NLM-RFI-11-0912-KDM/listing.html)
- Place of Performance
- Address: Center for Information Technology, Fernwood Building, Bethesda, Maryland, United States
- Record
- SN02573173-W 20110914/110913000711-4bffebd520f9ae5b52abe2139f32874e (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
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