ITES award update
By
Nick Wakeman
Some confusion has surrounded our reporting of a $500 million contract extension involving the Army's ITES 2 contract. Editor Nick Wakeman clears the air.
I’ll cut right to the chase – the $500 million Army contract award that I wrote up on Friday evening and pushed out into our newsletter this morning is a contract extension, not a new award.
Here’s how I ended up writing what I wrote, and what I know now.
It was after five o’clock Friday when the Defense Department released their contract awards for the day, and at the top of the list was a $500 million Army contract that was part of the IT Enterprise Solutions program or ITES.
It read like any other contract award, so I began working on it, but there were several things that didn’t make sense.
The announcement didn’t include a length of time for the contract. It also said it was in support of the ITES-2 Services contract, which we know is heading toward its end.
Then, I saw that the six winners were all incumbents.
In the back of mind, I thought, "Is this a contract extension?" But what threw me off was that the DOD announcement said bids were solicited, and 18 companies submitted bids.
My plan was to follow up today, which is what we’ve done.
What I know now is that the Army has extended the ceiling on ITES-2 Hardware, but not the length of time. It is still set to expire on July 14.
With the extension, the ordering under the contract is restricted to just the Army.
The Army is still evaluating the bids for ITES 3 Hardware. Deltek estimates that those awards will be made in October.
We’ll be out with the news as soon as those awards are made.