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ARMY

Army explores new $15B ITES contract

Vehicle worth billions to winners

  • By Nick Wakeman
  • Feb 08, 2013

The Army issued a request for information this week as it began preparation for the third generation of the Information Technology Enterprise Solutions contract, commonly called ITES.

The current ITES Services 2 contract expires in 2015. The Army is estimating that ITES-3 Services will be worth between $11 billion and $15 billion over five years.

The RFI includes a questionnaire asking questions such as:

  • The ability to work worldwide, including hostile areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • Providing services for IT products already in inventory.
  • Experience working with government or commercial customers.
  • Suggestions for task areas and labor categories.

The due date for responses is Feb. 21.

The Army apparently is debating whether to structure ITES 3 as a single, multiple-award contract, or as a group of contracts tied to a task area or IT taxonomy. The government asks about such a structure in question 13 where they want suggestions on how task areas should be grouped. They also want to know if there are benefits to breaking up the contract for industry and government.

The RFI includes a list of task areas under consideration for the contract. These include:

  • Business process reengineering
  • Information systems security
  • Information assurance
  • IT services
  • Enterprise design, integration and consolidation
  • Education and training
  • Program and project management
  • Systems operation and maintenance
  • Network support

The RFI also has a long list of labor categories.

The ITES contracts have been important vehicles for some of the largest contractors in the market. General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman each have won more than $1 billion in task orders under the vehicle, according to data from Deltek.

Since 2006, more than $7 billion in task orders have gone through ITES-2 Services, with the majority of that coming since 2009. In fiscal 2011 and 2012, task orders topped $1.8 billion in each year, according to Deltek.

About the Author

Nick Wakeman is the editor-in-chief of Washington Technology. Follow him on Twitter: @nick_wakeman.

Reader Comments

Thu, Feb 14, 2013

Where is this magical savings? Do you mean the fees they don't charge to cover their cost? The cost to the taxpayer is there whether you recoup it from the buyer or not. It all comes from the taxpayer. I am amazed at the number of times I hear that contracts and PMOs that don't charge a fee are free. That is simply false.

Wed, Feb 13, 2013

Well one benefit to customers is cost savings. On that $7b in task orders, customers, both Army & Federal, saved $70m over other GWACs.

Mon, Feb 11, 2013

The questions are eerily familiar to anyone in the acquisition realm. They have been asked 100 times before. They have been answered pretty definitively too by the existing GWACs Alliant, CIO-SP3, and SEWP. So, why is the Army cranking this machine up again? Who really needs it? If your job in government or in industry is to do that which has already been done, doesn't that qualify as waste? I would guess it's good for contracting officers at the Army who want to perpetuate their own special and unnecessary bureacracy. It's probably also good for the special club of primes who won't have to compete with the riff-raff. But it runs a up a tab for all involved and why?

Mon, Feb 11, 2013 Mike Fairfax

This new RFI routine demonstrates just how mindlessly and automatically the services and Government in general just plods ahead in spite of all external realities. Would anyone at Army dare ask, "Do we really need this?"

Mon, Feb 11, 2013 M Pat Reston

Nick, does the Federal Government really need this IT Services contract? Better yet, does the taxpayer need this? In an era of budget rollbacks and with the Administration's supposed focus on transparency, it seems a handful of GWACs (already in place, by the way) could handle anything ITES-3S would handle with much improved cross-agency consistency and transparency. So why waste Federal and Industry money. It's all coming down on the taxpayer. How do we justify this frivolous bureaucratic execise in excess to the taxpayer and their debt-laden grandchildren. Is there no adult leadership at OMB or the in the military Heads of Contracting? Where is the GAO on this?

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