Global Computer Enterprises wins fed data deal

Global Computer Enterprises Inc. won a $24 million contract from the General Services Administration for development, implementation and operation of the next-generation Federal Procurement Data System, company officials announced May 1.

The FPDS is the central repository of statistical information on federal contracting. It contains detailed information on contract actions of more than $25,000 and summary data on procurements of less that $25,000.

Federal procurement systems rely on batch interfaces to provide data to the FPDS. The new system, FPDS-NG, will integrate with every government procurement system in real time.

This electronic interoperability will allow contracting agencies to reduce or eliminate some of the manual processes required to collect and summarize information about millions of smaller procurements, saving time and money, according to officials of the Gaithersburg, Md., company.

"The timeliness, accuracy and availability of the data are areas that we are looking to dramatically improve with FPDS-NG [to] achieve unprecedented visibility into federal spending," said David Lucas, director of business development for Global Computer Enterprises.

One of the GSA's key objectives is to reduce transaction costs from nearly $40 per transaction to less than $1.

"The FPDS-NG re-engineering effort is a critical e-government initiative, because the award data that it collects helps Congress and the public understand how taxpayer funds are being spent every day by the government," said David Drabkin, GSA's deputy associate administrator for acquisition policy. "Right now, the collection and reporting upon such spending is an expensive and time consuming process. We look forward to the benefits of a real-time, fully integrated FPDS-NG beginning next fiscal year."

Global Computer Enterprises is a small business that specializes in large-scale systems integration using Oracle, Java, Web services and XML technologies. Under the contract, the company is responsible for creating and maintaining all aspects of the FPDS-NG, including application hosting, reporting functionality that incorporates the latest data mining technologies, training for users and administrators, help-desk operations, integration with agency procurement systems, creating Web services and establishing an XML specification for procurement data.

The company and its partners, IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and Business Objects S.A., worked for more than a year producing a prototype system, said Ray Muslimani, company president.