ITEM:		CONSENT CALENDAR
2.	CONSIDER APPROVING AGREEMENT WITH DEVEERA, INC. FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICES
Meeting Date:			September 16, 2019	Budgeted:	No (savings from not hiring IT Manager)
From:			David J. Stoldt,	Program/
			General Manager	Line Item No. :	Professional Fees
Prepared By:			Suresh Prasad	Cost Estimate:	$82,376.00
General Counsel Review: Pending review by District Counsel.
Committee Recommendation: The Administrative Committee reviewed this item on September 9, 2019 and recommended approval.
CEQA Compliance: This action does not constitute a project as defined by the California Environmental Quality Act Guidelines Section 15378.

SUMMARY: With the recent retirement of District’s Information Technology (IT) Manager, there is a need to immediately find a replacement to fill that position. Based on the size and needs of the District, the replacement of a full time IT Manager position can most effectively be filled with the services of a consultant firm.

With only two and half weeks of retirement notice from the outgoing IT Manager, District staff immediately started contacting IT consulting firms in the area to solicit proposals. Three firms were contacted (Rayne Technology, DeVeera, Inc., and Alvarez Technology).

Staff met with all three firms and went over the District’s requirements for IT services. All three firms had representatives spend few hours on-site going through the discovery process to gather information. Information gathered during this discovery process was used to compile proposals delivered by the IT firms. Some of the services provided will be monitoring server 24/7, server and work station preventative maintenance, virus and anti-spam protection, network monitoring, and help desk support, etc. All three firms contacted were able to provide proposals within a week’s time, attached as Exhibit 2-A.

After evaluating the current inventory of the District’s IT infrastructure, all three firms recommended the District immediately change its backup and disaster recovery (BDR) system. In the event of catastrophic IT failure, the District’s existing BDR system will take weeks to rebuild and recover data. There could potentially be irrecoverable data losses. With the proposed change in the BDR system, the recovery time would be reduced to approximately few hours with no loss of data. The current proposal includes a new BDR system for the District.

Since outsourcing IT services is new to the District, staff would like to try outsourcing the IT services on a short term basis and return to the Board towards the end of fiscal year with a long

term plan. The proposed contract term will be from September 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020 for the managed IT solution. The BDR contract will be for a three year term. Funding for this will come from savings realized by not hiring a full time IT Manager, which was budgeted in FY 2019-2020.

Based on the proposals received, staff recommends authorizing to enter into an agreement with DeVeera, Inc. The results of the three proposals are as follows:

Since IT services is a crucial function of the District, staff had to engage the services of DeVeera, Inc under the General Manager’s authority to fill in the void left by the departure of the IT Manager.

RECOMMENDATION: District staff recommends authorizing the General Manager or the Administrative Services Manager/CFO to enter into an Agreement with DeVeera, Inc. to provide Information Technology services for an amount of $71,632.00 plus 15% contingency of $10,744.00, for a not-to-exceed amount of $82,376.00. The agreement term for the managed IT solutions will be until June 30, 2020. The backup disaster recovery contract will be for a three year term. Funding for this will come from savings realized by not hiring a full time IT Manager, which was budgeted in FY 2019-2020 at about $175,000.

EXHIBIT

2-A Proposals for IT Services from DeVeera Inc., Rayne Technologies, and Alvarez Technology

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