Army notifying winners of $5B ITES-3H contract
By
Nick Wakeman
The Army has begun reaching out to companies and notifying them whether they have won a spot on the $5 billion ITES-3H contract for hardware and related services. Who's won so far?
The Army is one the verge of announcing winners of its $5 billion ITES-3H contract for hardware and related services.
Sources have told me that the Army began notifying winners on Thursday, and an Army spokesman said to me that an update is coming on Tuesday.
Among the winners are:
- CDW-G
- Dell
- GovAcquisition
- GovConnection
- IBM
- MicroTech
More companies are expected to be named, and I’m trying to confirm those. At the very least, we’ll know more on Tuesday.
The ITES-2H contract has been an important vehicle for the Army, and the competition for ITES-3H has been fierce. There have been protests and delays. The Army has extended ITES-2H four times and added over $1 billion to the ceiling to keep the vehicle open to buyers.
For ITES-3H, the Army has been conducting a two-phase competition, and it was hit with 20 protests in 2014 when it cut the contenders down from 39 bidders in phase one to 12 for phase two. Because of the protests, the Army took several corrective actions and let several bidders back into the competition.
The Army, of course, could be facing more delays if losing bidders file more protests. The Army originally said it wanted to make four large and four small business awards, but with all the protests and the need to get the vehicle in place rather than extend 2H again, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more winners than eight.
The incumbents under ITES-2H are Dell, IBM, Unicom, CDW-G, Iron Bow and World Wide Technology. Collectively, they’ve pulled in $5.95 billion in task orders since 2007 with World Wide leading the pack with $1.6 billion in task orders, according to Deltek. Iron Bow is a close second at $1.5 billion. CDW-G has $1.1 billion in task orders.
Unicom and Dell also have done well with $806.9 million and $755.8 million respectively.
IBM trails far behind with $185.5 million in task orders.
The Army will use the ITES-3H contract to buy servers, workstations, laptops, PCs, networking equipment, and storage.
The contract was originally open to anyone in the government, but to win approval of the extensions, the Army had to limit it to just itself. But even when it was open to all, the Army still was making 80 percent of the purchases.