IBM wins one part of bid protest, loses another

IBM Corp. and Presidio Network Solutions prevailed in part of their protests over a lost Homeland Security Department contract for enterprise data center support services, but lost another portion.

For IBM, the company is fighting to hang on to an incumbent contract with DHS. This contract is worth over $100 million.

The two companies protested awards of blanket purchase agreements to Agilex Technologies and Leidos to support mainframes, servers, databases, application servers and other engineering and operations needs of the DHS data centers.

The companies had different grounds for their protests against each company.

With Leidos, they complained about its low pricing, its plan to hire incumbent employees and that the split with Science Applications International Corp. wasn’t given enough weight in the evaluation.

The Government Accountability Office rejected those arguments and said that choice of Leidos was reasonable.

IBM and Presidio had better luck in their arguments against the choice of Agilex.

They argued that Agilex made assumptions in its bid that were not supported by the solicitation. Specifically, Agilex wrote in its proposal that it assumed some of the workload was performed by government employees. It did that in several areas.

GAO agreed.

Another complaint was that Agilex’s proposal exceeded the page limit set by DHS in its solicitation.

Again, GAO agreed and sided with IBM and Presidio.

GAO is recommending that DHS terminate the contact with Agilex and re-evaluate its bid. Or, the agency can reopen the entire competition.

Click here to read the entire GAO decision.