70 -- RedHat Software

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to procure the ?brand name? RedHat Linux Operating System software product. RedHat Linux OS has already been deployed successfully in a variety of projects in our IT lab and production environment to support our Tier 1 (Load Balancing and HTTP) environments. USPTO has chosen RedHat Linux OS as our preferred standard Linux OS platform and has invested greatly in training our support staff and hiring more support engineers. The supporting infrastructure to provide patch management, OS software deployment and baseline management are specifically for the RedHat OS. RedHat OS is an alternative to the more proprietary commercial Unix Operating Systems such as IBM-AIX or HP-UX, both of which we use today in our production servers and in the lab. Moreover these two commercial OS can not be used on the commodity, Intel based hardware and they work only on the IBM and HP specific hardware. The only alternative to these commercial OS that can run on the Intel based commodity, cost effective hardware is the Linux Operating system. Even though there are several flavors of the Linux OS such as SuSE, Debian and RedHat, we at PTO chose RedHat Linux because of the support man power and resources we currently have. The Linux operating system software is free, open source Operating system; however, for support in the production environment, USPTO must purchase a support subscription from a value added provider such as RedHat. This announcement is considered a ?brand name? justification. This acquisition will be conducted utilizing Part 13 of the FAR, Simplified Acquisition procedures, and the test program authorized in FAR subpart 13.5, and the Patent and Trademark Acquisition Guidelines (PTAG) among the existing USPTO Information Technology ID/IQ contractors. No written solicitation will be issued as a result. The point of contact for information regarding this notice is Connie Lum at (571)272-4167, or via E-mail at [email protected].