Industrial Design Search Solution

Trade Agreement: CETA/WTO-AGP/CPTPP/CFTA/FTAs with Peru/Colombia/Panama/Korea/UK
Tendering Procedures: Generally only one firm has been invited to bid
Non-Competitive Procurement Strategy: Exclusive Rights
Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement: No
Vendor Name and Address: 
Clarivate Analytics (UK) Limited
Friars House
160 Blackfriars Rd
United Kingdom
SE18EZ
Nature of Requirements: 


CIPO - Industrial Design Search Process

REQUIREMENT

CIPO is seeking a SaaS that will enable examiners to conduct automated design research on wider datasets and return a rank ordered list of similar designs with their classifications and their sources. The purpose of this software is to improve CIPO’s ability to deliver quality and timely Intellectual Property rights with a modernized search software and increase the processing speed of industrial design applications within the Trademarks and Industrial Designs Branch (TIDB).

BACKGROUND

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), a Special Operating Agency of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, administers Canada's intellectual property (IP) systems comprising of Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights, Industrial Designs and Integrated Circuit Topographies. Its primary clients include IP protection applicants, agents representing applicants, users of IP systems and the Canadian business community.

The Trademarks and Industrial Designs Branch (TIDB) is responsible for examining and registering industrial design applications. To be registrable, a design must be novel, meaning that an identical or substantially similar design must not have been disclosed to the public, in Canada or elsewhere. In order to complete this assessment, designs are first classified according to their relative finished articles. This allows Searchers to narrow down their search to relevant prior art and identify similar designs, which will be reviewed by the Examiners to determine the novelty of the applied for design.

The Searchers currently conduct manual searches against thousands of registered and pending designs in Canada and other jurisdictions including the United States, the European Union, Japan, Israel and a number of other countries. To aid in this search, TIDB subscribes to Orbit, a database aggregation service from Questel. Despite the product’s somewhat user-friendly search interface and Industrial Design Registry aggregation, a manual search (ie. Visual inspection of each design within a class) and manual ranking of search results is still required. This is a time consuming activity with no assurance or consistency that all similar designs have been identified for each search, given the number of designs to be cross-referenced.

Initial and Optional Requirement (s)

1. Software as a Service Subscription for Compumark Trademark and Design Search Tool
2. Configuration Services
3. Maintenance and Support; and training services
4. 2-1 Year Optional Subscription Periods

JUSTIFICATION FOR THE PRE-SELECTED SUPPLIER
The reasons for single tendering are described in Annex A.

Section 6 of the Government Contract Regulations is being invoked in this procurement as only one person or firm is capable of performing the contract.

CFTA, Article 513, paragraph 1.(b) and 1.(c) are applicable on the basis of limited tendering due to compatibility with existing products, to recognize exclusive rights, such as exclusive licenses, copyright and patent rights, or to maintain specialized products that must be maintained by the manufacturer or its representative, and when there is an absence of competition for technical reasons and the goods or services can be supplied only by a particular supplier and no alternative or substitute exists.


9. Exclusions and/or Limited Tendering Reasons

The following exclusion(s) and/or limited tendering reasons are invoked under the:

a. Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) - Article: 513.1(b) (iii);
b. World Trade Organization - Agreement on Government Procurement
c. (WTO-AGP) - Under the Revised GPA - Article XIII, 1 (b) (iii);
d. Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade
e. Agreement (CETA) - Article(s) Article 19.12 (b) (iii)
f. Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership
g. (CPTPP) - Article(s): 15.10 , 2 (b) (iii) (s)
h. Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA) - Article(s) Kbis-09
i. (b),Article Kbis-09 (c)
j. Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement - Article(s): 1409 (b) (iii);
k. Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement - Article(s): 17.11 2 (b) (iii)
l. Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement - Article 14.3, Under the Revised
m. GPA - Article XIII, 1 (b) (iii);
n. Canada-Panama Free Trade Agreement - Article(s) 16.10 (b) (iii)
o. Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement (CPFTA) - Article(s1409 (b) (iii)
p. Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA) - Article(s Article 10.13
(b) (iii); 
PERIOD OF CONTRACT
The proposed contract is for the purchase of a subscription for a software as a service solution including configuration services of the software solution, for period of one year to begin on the date of contract award with two additional one-year option periods. (Total duration: 3 years).

NAME AND ADDRESS OF THE PROPOSED CONTRACTOR:
Clarivate Analytics (UK) Limited
Friars House
160 Blackfriars Rd
London
SE18EZ
United Kingdom















ANNEX A
MINIMAL ESSENTIAL MANDATORY REQUIREMENTS 
Any interested supplier must demonstrate by way of statement of capabilities that it meets all of the mandatory requirements below:

M1. Contractor must provide access to and use of a Software as a Service solution that meets all the mandatory requirements below.
M2. The Contractor must provide user/password based access to the Solution for up to 200 concurrent Users without impacting the performance standards identified in the requirement M13.
M3. The Solution must provide an administrator account that includes the functionality to control the access of individual user accounts.
M4. The Solution must provide the functionality to cross reference Canada Data from the Canadian Industrial Designs and Industrial Designs from other IPOs including Argentina, Brazil, Benelux, China, Europe (Community Designs), France, Germany, Great Britain, International Register/Hague, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, South Korea, Switzerland and the United States.

SUPPORT REQUIREMENTS

M5. The Solution must be accessible by Users on a 24hrs/7days basis, except during scheduled service maintenance.
M6. Scheduled service maintenance must be outside CIPO business hours, 7:00 - 18:00 EST Monday-Friday, (excluding statutory holidays observed by the federal government in the province from which the call is made).
M7. The Contractor must provide technical support during CIPO business hours, 7:00 - 18:00 EST Monday - Friday, (excluding statutory holidays observed by the federal government in the province from which the call is made).

TRAINING REQUIREMENTS
M8. The Contractor must provide self-learning and/or online sessions to make an examiner proficient using the solution as well as corresponding training documentation in both Canada’s official languages, French and English. The training material must be available for the length of the contract.
M9. The Contractor must provide training in Canada’s official languages of French and English. Training must be conducted as two separate classes based on language; one class in French and one class in English.
M10. The Contractor must ensure the training material is kept up to date based on new features and updates of the solution.

SYSTEM INTERFACE REQUIREMENTS
M11. The Contractor must provide Users with a web-based graphical user interface. The Solution’s user interface, messages, help and manuals must be available in French and English. The user must be able to select and toggle between English and French languages within a single session.
M12. System interface must be available in both English and French languages and meet Canada’s Official Languages Policy. Please refer to following: https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/language_rights/index

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
M13. The Solution must provide a response time of 90 seconds or under for returning search results when searching one design for a specific classification.
M14. The Solution must have the functionality to receive and process the information from the daily dissemination of classified pending applications as well as published and registered applications.
M15. The Solution must have the self-regulating capability to remove unpublished, inactive and withdrawn applications from the search results when receiving the daily dissemination of classified pending applications.
M16. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to select a design to query against the designs (including variant Canadian designs) contained in the Solutions database(s).
M17. The Solution must have the functionality to receive industrial design Application Information sent to the contractor by CIPO.

a. Application Information is defined as:

i. the date of registration (if available);
ii. the date the application was made available to the public prior to registration (if applicable);
iii. the filing date of the application;
iv. priority information (country, date, priority number);
v. the application/registration number;
vi. the Canadian classification;
vii. the name and address of the current applicant or registered proprietor of the design;
viii. the name of the finished article in respect of which the design is registered;
ix. the latest representation of the design, i.e. drawing of the different views of the design (these may be amended following application amendments);
x. the figure legend accompanying the representations; and,
xi. the descriptive or limiting statement of the design (if applicable);
M18. The Solution must have the Functionality to enable User(s) to identify variant design views contained in the same application based on the accompanying figure legend. Variant designs are designs contained in the same application and not differing substantially from one another. The term “design” includes variant designs in addition to all other unique designs.
M19. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to apply the following search filters on all Application Information in addition to:

a. The jurisdiction(s) or database(s) that will be searched;
b. The Canadian or Locarno class(es) that are to be searched; and,
c. The range date based of the filing, priority and/or publication date;
M20. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to define/highlight the most important features or view of a query design (Query Design) and search for them against the other design views contained in the Solution to then rank order them by the most visually similar representation of the designs.
M21. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to return the resulting designs with at least an 80% true positive rate, i.e. identifies a truly significantly similar design 80% of the time and no less than a 20% false negative rate, i.e. fails to identify a significant only 20% of the time. This will be determined by CIPO when evaluating the solutions against a predefined dataset of query designs.
M22. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to view all available Application Information for each rank ordered design result.
M23. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to copy and paste the information from the results generated by the solution.
M24. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to download all available Application Information (in PDF) for each rank ordered design.
M25. The Solution must be accessible via the Internet as defined in M2 and be secured as defined in M31. Users who will be accessing the service may either be in the CIPO Offices or from remote connections, the contractor needs to identify if access control is IP Address based or purely user account based. It is preferred that the solution is NOT IP Address based.
M26. The Solution must be able to accommodate an annual growth of 5% in the number of concurrent Users without impacting the performance of the Solution.
M27. The Solution must meet the minimum quality standard results as mentioned in requirements M21 in 95% of the searches.

SECURITY REQUIREMENTS

M28. The Contractor must comply with Government of Canada (GoC) security standards for handling of the CIPO Protected B Canada Data, as identified in Annex 1.
M29. The Solution must have the functionality to enable User(s) to store Application Information in manner that complies with a Protected B level of security as defined by Treasury Board in section J.2.4.2.2 of the following link https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=32614. All information provided by CIPO is not to be shared with any other party.
M30. The Solution provider must host Canada’s Data for this Solution on servers located in Canada only.
M31. The solution will interact with Protected B information and must be approved for this level of security. Required certifications include ITSG_133, ISO 270001, and Soc II Type II. Protected B level of security is defined by Treasury Board in section J.2.4.2.2 of the following link https://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=32614.

SECURITY REQUIREMENTS FOR CANADIAN SUPPLIER (CISD CLAUSE)
M32. The Contractor must safeguard Canada Data at all times by taking all measures reasonably necessary to secure it and protect its integrity and confidentiality. To do so, at a minimum, the Contractor must:
a. store the Canada Data electronically so that a password (or a similar access control mechanism, such as biometric access) is required to access the system or database in which the Canada Data is stored,
b. ensure that passwords or other access controls are provided only to individuals who require access to the Canada Data to perform the Service,
c. not outsource the electronic storage of Canada Data to a third party (including an affiliate) unless Canada has first consented in writing,
d. safeguard any database or computer system on which the Canada Data is stored from external access using methods that are generally used, from time to time, by prudent public and private sector organizations in Canada in order to protect highly secure or sensitive information,
e. maintain a secure backup copy of all Records, updated at least weekly,
f. implement any reasonable security or protection measures requested by Canada from time to time and, and
g. notify Canada immediately of any security breaches (such as any time an unauthorized individual accesses any Canada Data).
Canada Data Use
M33. The Contractor may not collect, analyze, or use Canada Data for any purpose other than to deliver the     Service.
Canada Data Retrieval and Destruction
M34. Data Retrieval
a. On Canada's request, the Contractor must deliver to Canada a full copy of the Canada Data, in a format the parties agree on in writing.
Canada Data Destruction
M35. On the expiration or termination of this Contract, or at Canada's request, the Contractor must
a. promptly destroy all Canada Data in its control, and
b. if requested by Canada, deliver to Canada a certificate executed by the Contractor confirming      compliance with the destruction obligation.

DATA REQUIREMENTS
M36. The Contractor must import Canada’s data to the solution on a daily basis which includes Protected B data, see requirement M31 for definition, and open Canadian Industrial Designs.





U8300-200492/A
Endicott, Scott
Telephone No. - (873) 354-5173
Delivery Date: Above-mentioned

You are hereby notified that the government intends to negotiate with one firm only as identified above. Should you have any questions concerning this requirement, contact the contracting officer identified above.

An Advance Contract Award Notice (ACAN) allows departments and agencies to post a notice, for no less than fifteen (15) calendar days, indicating to the supplier community that it intends to award a good, service or construction contract to a pre-identified contractor. If no other supplier submits, on or before the closing date, a Statement of Capabilities that meets the requirements set out in the ACAN, the contracting authority may then proceed with the award.  However, should a Statement of Capabilities be found to meet the requirements set out in the ACAN, then the contracting authority will proceed to a full tendering process.

Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available to provide the services/goods described herein, may submit a statement of capabilities in writing to the contact person identified in this Notice on or before the closing date of this Notice. The statement of capabilities must clearly demonstrate how the supplier meets the advertised requirements.

The PWGSC file number, the contracting officer's name and the closing date of the ACAN must appear on the outside of the envelope in block letters or, in the case of a facsimile transmission, on the covering page.

The Crown retains the right to negotiate with suppliers on any procurement.

Documents may be submitted in either official language of Canada.