Happy first birthday to GSA's Alliant contract

A year after awarding two massive information technology contracts, the General Services Administration’s Alliant program appears to be working well.

The Coalition for Government Procurement reported in its Feb. 19 Friday Flash newsletter that as of January:

Agencies have awarded 22 task orders worth as much as $238 million over the life of the contracts through the Alliant governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC).

Agencies made 15 awards worth as much as $174 million through the Alliant Small Business GWAC.

Departments have bought a variety of services off Alliant contracts, including network infrastructure implementation and expansion, IT security, IT disaster recovery implementation, software acquisition installation and training, IT sustainment and infrastructure design.

Alliant and Alliant Small Business are indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts. Alliant Small Business began taking orders in February 2009. GSA awarded the Alliant contract in March, following a lawsuit.

The newsletter also said agencies had concerns regarding the large number of contractors on both of the Alliant contracts, but those concerns have been allayed over the last year.

GSA awarded its $50 billion Alliant technology services contract to 59 large businesses, and GSA awarded 72 small companies places on Alliant Small Business. Those large numbers made some people wonder whether so many companies competing for work would gum up the procurement process as bids from everyone would flood in for any one task order. The coalition said it didn’t happen though.

On average agencies have received between three and five bidders per task order. The largest number of bids for a task order was eight proposals and the least amount of offers was one. And the newsletter notes, there’s been no bid protests.

Posted by Matthew Weigelt on Feb 19, 2010 at 1:57 PM