GTSI Files Protest of Army Contract Withdrawal

GTSI Corp. of Chantilly, Va., has filed a protest with the General Accounting Office, challenging the Army Materiel Command's granting of a protest that stripped GTSI of its share of the $1.4 billion Maxi-Minis and Databases 1 contract.

A spokeswoman for the command said the government has until Jan. 12, 2001, to file a response, with the GAO's decision due by March 26.

The Communications and Electronics Command awarded the contract in August to IBM Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., and GTSI. The two losing contractors in the competition, Litton PRC Inc. of McLean, Va., and Federal Data Corp. of Bethesda, Md., filed protests shortly after the awards were announced. Federal Data is now part of Logicon Inc. of Herndon, Va.

"We felt that GTSI did not follow the pricing proposal guidelines, [and] it
was asked of CECOM to go back and resolve this issue," said Logicon spokesman
Bob Koch.

The Army Materiel Command, which managed the dispute resolution process, let stand the award to IBM, worth a potential $618 million. But the command upheld in part and denied in part the protest against GTSI, jeopardizing an award worth up to $857 million to the company.

The command directed the Communications and Electronics Command to take corrective action. If it wants to pursue multiple awards of the contract, the Army Materiel Command suggested the competition be re-opened to allow revisions from GTSI and other previous bidders, in accordance with the ground rules contained in the solicitation.

The contract is to provide the Army with commercial, high-end 64-bit servers, workstations, operating systems, software, networking, engineering, training and support services. The Navy and the Internal Revenue Service also are expected to use the contract extensively.