ETQ Reliance is an enterprise Quality Management and Compliance Management suite that provides a flexible platform for Quality Management, Environmental Health & Safety (EHS) Management, and Compliance Management. The NRC utilizes the EHS module as part of the NRC's Protected Web Server. The NRC's Protected Web Server (PWS) enables the NRC to fulfill its mission of communicating sensitive information to licensees and developing more formal, long-term relationships with Federal, State, and local organizations with shared responsibilities for protecting nuclear facilities and activities and responding to incidents. PWS fulfills a valuable need in relation to the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative (NSI), which began in 2008. PWS is the NRC's contribution to this important national initiative to centralize suspicious activity reporting in the interest of assessing national trends across industries and critical infrastructure. ETQ Reliance is also included in the NRC's Technical Reference Model; The TRM documents the technologies and commercial products that have been established as service standards in the agency's information technology (IT) infrastructure. The TRM provides useful guidance for NRC staff to follow when procuring technology or technical services to reduce technology risk and redundancy and ensure the selection and use of viable technology that is aligned with technology strategy in support of business needs. Items approved in the TRM have been reviewed by the Information Technology/Information Management Board (ITB) for IT security, maintainability, infrastructure compatibility, and investment redundancy with other assets already in use.

To replace ETQ Reliance with some other solution would cause the NRC to incur significant cost, would be highly disruptive and would introduce significant risk to the NRC's Protected Web Server.

The authority for this acquisition is FAR 13.106-1, which permits soliciting from a single source, if the contracting officer determines that the circumstances of the contract action deem only once source is reasonably available. ETQ, LLC confirmed on May 29, 2019 that they do not authorize other sources to provide its proprietary ETQ Reliance software.