DHS issues pacts for multibillion-dollar Eagle program

The Homeland Security Department has notified successful bidders for IT work under the multibillion-dollar Eagle acquisition that they will be able to start seeking work via task orders issued under the procurement tomorrow.The award letters that the department issued this week went to "unrestricted track" bidders, or large companies. The department has pledged to issue comparable contracts to small-business bidders next month.A department spokesman said DHS would announce the winners of the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts on Thursday, June 29.But companies in the homeland security IT market today were abuzz with news of the new contracts, which pave a path to bid on as much as three-quarters of the department's total annual technology spending of about $6 billion. The initial contracts run for a period of five years and may be renewed. Total spending under the project could reach a cap of $45 billion.DHS made the contract awards in five categories, as follows:Vendor executives noted that a typical project task order might cross two or more categories. The department specified that contract holders could bid not only on all task orders within the categories that they won, but also potentially on task orders that crossed more than one category.The department issued letters to the contract winners that specifically barred the companies from announcing the government's decision to the public, and especially to the news media, during a three-day period during which Congress has the information exclusively. As a result, the winning vendors declined to confirm the information publicly.But information from various sources in the IT market space filled in the following aspects of the matter:? DHS appears to have made a total of 20 contract awards to large companies. This information is significant because those awards are spread across five categories of IT services, as described above. If DHS had chosen a significantly larger number of vendors for the contracts in each category, each winner would have received "a meaningless schedule contract," in the words of one market source.? Some of the contract winners are:Some of the industry sources and vendors involved in the acquisition stated that the complete list of Eagle contract winners included virtually all the major systems integrators active in the homeland security market.Eagle is also known as Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions.The department its request for proposals under Eagle late last September. DHS said it had received a strong response to the RFP. Industry sources said DHS received hundreds of proposals.The department the contract awards to this month from an earlier expected date of March. DHS has pledged to issue contracts for the small-business part of the acquisition next month.Within the in first 10 days of the contract launch (that is, 10 days from June 28), each of these companies must have a web site up so DHS customers can place orders for services.Within 30 days of the contract launch, the winning vendors must notify the chief procurement officer's IT Acquisition Center about which contracts they have won under Eagle task orders.