No. 24-1204
Background
CMS, a component of the Department of Health and Human Services, provides healthcare coverage for beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and for individuals enrolled in a qualified health plan through the health- insurance marketplace created by the Affordable Care Act. (AR 15.)
The Infrastructure and User Services Group (“IUSG”) of CMS’s Office of Information Technology (“OIT”) “supports the CMS cloud infrastructure by provisioning, maintaining and supporting applications serving CMS’s beneficiaries.” (AR 17.) The IUSG also “provides endto-end application hosting services for over 300 CMS business workloads.” (AR 16.) The IUSG’s role includes providing “all aspects of data center operations; physical infrastructure operations; compute and storage services; network administration; virtualization operations; application infrastructure operations; and application middleware operations …
Discussion
To conduct market research before issuing the RFQ, CMS issued on April 22, 2024, a Request for Information (“RFI”) (AR 48-51), to which the draft SOO was attached. (AR 12-47.) The RFI was posted to the General Services Administration (“GSA”) e-buy website under two categories, Information Technology Professional Services and Cloud Computing and Cloud Related Information Technology. (AR 587, 590.)
The RFI described CMS’s new contract as “support[ing] the [OIT and IUSG] vision which includes the following but is not limited to acquiring, designing, building, operating, maintaining, refining, modernizing, and evolving all current and future cloud services …
Decision
The plaintiff’s problem is that CMS is not seeking to acquire what IntelliBridge is looking to sell. CMS is seeking to acquire an array of cloud-computing services and is acquiring those services from vendors with currently available commercial services. IntelliBridge’s batCAVE platform offers a narrower functionality than what CMS is seeking. CMS is therefore complying with its legal obligations, and its market research was appropriate to the procurement. Accordingly, IntelliBridge’s motion for judgment on the administrative record is denied, and the defendant’s cross-motion for judgment on the administrative record is granted.
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