Attendees:
Kevin Barron,
Steve Francis,
Roger Lenard,
Elise Meyer,
Larry Murdock,
Stephen Pope,
Kevin Schmidt,
Jason Simpson, and
Mark Schildhauer
Unable to Attend:
Nathan Freitas,
Ben Humphrey,
Jim Frew,
Rich Prohaska,
Vince Sefcik,
Rob Bootsma, and
Ed Mehlschau
To Sole Source or RFP?
Elise said that she had discussed the group's desired strategy with Bob Bisho,
and that he said that we can't have vendor present design
solutions for our network and then have us use the information to either
do a sole source or do an RFP. Steve Francis concurred, saying that this was
a situation when vendors sued. Bob also had said that we
couldn't request the competitive analysis report because a) bidders couldn't
know who their competition is, and b) he didn't think that we would get any
useful information from it. If we have any questions about the rules
governing the RFP process, we should check the UC Business and Finance Bulletin on Materiel Management.
Everyone was still interested in getting a white paper (MS Word document) like the one sent to CENIC, so
Elise said that she would check again with Bob about it.
Steve related to the Group that Vince's opinion was that there was a strong
reason to purchase equipment by the same vendor as the CENIC WAN equipment.
And that we would need strong justification to do anything else because of
compatibility issues.
Elise discussed her meeting with one of the vendors that convinced her that
we needed to have the vendors present designs for their solutions so that
we fully understood how the technologies fit together. The correct configuration
would cost ~ $110,000 (including tax) vs. the $92,000 reported at the previous
meeting.
There was a long discussion about whether to Sole Source or RFP. We finally voted, and
there were 5 votes + 1 leaner for the RFP, 1 leaner for the Sole Source, and 2 abstentions.
Our reasons for doing the RFP follow:
- Our process to date has provided good information about what technologies are currently implementable today,
and has determined our requirements for a new backbone solution.
Our research led us to change our initial requirements from an ATM-only switched solution
to a mixed technology solution that includes ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and routing capabilities.
But our information gathering has been informal,
and although we sent out an RFI (about ATM features) and a couple of sample configurations for ballpark pricing,
we have received different levels of information about the different vendors' solutions.
- The scope of the project changed when the campus was asked to pay large annual fees to connect to the inter-campus CalREN network,
so the CalREN-2 campus backbone is going to become a more general campus resource. Since this new backbone may become the de facto next-generation campus backbone,
we need to make sure that our solution not only is the best for the CalREN participants, but also, potentially, for the entire campus.
- Since our requirements and the scope changed midway through our process,
we want more information from the vendors based on those new conditions.
- Due to the complexities of integrating ATM (cell) and Ethernet (frame) technologies we want the
vendors' engineers to diagram how their equipment would be used in our network topology.
- Finally, an RFP provides a fair and equitable process.
RFP issues
It was asked whether doing an RFP meant that we would send it to all seven
of the vendors that we sent the RFI to. We decided that we would present the
reasons why we eliminated some of the vendors to purchasing and let them make
the call. It was asked whether allowing a multi-box solution opened up the
process to those vendors who couldn't provide single FSBs. We decided that
it didn't.
Action Items for Next Meeting
- Research Group representatives need to ask the Research Groups whether
they want an OC-3 ATM connection, or a 100BaseFX connection. They should
also ask what they anticipate needing one year from now.
- Elise will draft an RFP and send it to the group.
- Elise will rewrite the Fiber request document so that it can
be submitted to the CNC via the BEG as a networking funding request.
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