To: Board of Supervisors
From: Marc Shorr, Information Technology Director
Report Title: Purchase Order with ePlus Technology, Inc.
☒Recommendation of the County Administrator ☐ Recommendation of Board Committee
RECOMMENDATIONS:
APPROVE and AUTHORIZE the Purchasing Agent, on behalf of the Chief Information Officer, to execute a purchase order with ePlus Technology Inc, subject to the F5 Government Solutions LLC. Maintenance Terms and Conditions, in an amount not to exceed $50,000 for F5 Network hardware maintenance and support services for the period of March 12, 2026, through March 11, 2027.
FISCAL IMPACT:
The cost of this product is included in the Department’s FY 25-26 budget. 100% user departments.
BACKGROUND:
ePlus Technology Inc. offers enterprise information technology solutions and strategic partnerships, with F5 Government Solutions, LLC. ("F5"), a leader in application and security solutions. The Department of Information Technology ("DoIT") Wide Area Network (WAN) staff utilizes F5's maintenance and support services to manage the County's BIG-IP platform. The BIG-IP includes a variety of products, such as Traffic Management, Application Delivery Controllers (ADC), Access Management, Security and Analytics and Monitoring, all designed to enhance the availability, security and performance of applications and services delivered across the County network.
F5 Government Solutions LLC's Maintenance Terms and Conditions limit F5's liability to the amount of fees paid under the agreement.
ePlus Technology was selected through a competitively bid process. The Department requested quotes from four vendors; two declined to participate. Among the submissions, ePlus offered the lowest bid.
CONSEQUENCE OF NEGATIVE ACTION:
If support is not renewed, the subscription for updating the Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Application Security Manager (ASM) will be impacted. The ASM safeguards mission-critical web infrastructure from web application attacks, including Layer 7 Denial of Service (DoS) /Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), brute force attacks, web scraping, and monitors protected web applications. Without support, DoIT will not be able to request assistance on behalf of the user departments in the event of an incident or attack.