Raytheon files complaint over $222M sole-source contract
By
Nick Wakeman
Raytheon is telling GAO that that the Army is wrong to not hold a competition for a commercial computing environment that it awarded to another company.
Raytheon is pushing back against an Army decision to award a $222 million software contract to a Danish company to provide a framework for a common operating environment.
Raytheon’s complaint—no competition for a commercial solution. They’ve filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office.
Using a GSA vehicle, the Army awarded the contract to Systematic Inc. The company is based out of Denmark but has a U.S. affiliate headquartered in Centreville, Va., that operates under a special security agreement allowing it to bid on U.S. defense and intelligence projects.
According to procurement documents, the Army was looking for a commercial product that would let it do rapid application development across several computing environments. The initiative is part of its Common Operating Environment Version 3 initiative.
The two environments it is looking at are the command post computing environment and the mounted computing environment. The Army wants to simplify the environments and combine them to improve logistics, intelligence, airspace management and other operations. Currently, the Army has been using a customized solution for both.
In its search for a commercial solution, the Army received feedback to a request for information from EOIR Technologies (now Polaris Alpha), ESRI, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Systematic.
EOIR and ESRI were quickly rejected but the Army asked Raytheon and GD to supply their software for evaluation.
The Army already had evaluated Systematic’s software so they said they didn’t need to evaluate it at the same time they looked at Raytheon’s and GD’s software packages.
The Army rejected Raytheon and GD after the evaluation. “The conclusion of these tests and assessments, in addition to their response to the RFI, was that only Systematic Inc. could provide the COTS/NDI software infrastructure package to satisfy (the) capabilities required,” the Army wrote.
The contract awarded to Systematic has a one-year base of $39.3 million. With four one-year options it goes to $222.1 million.
But the contract includes an option to buy a Defense Department wide unlimited license agreement along with corresponding maintenance and support services.
If that happens, the value of the contract could go up.
It makes sense to me that Raytheon would protest and I wouldn’t be surprised if GD follows suit.
It seems to me that the Army cut off the competition before it could start.
A decision by GAO is expected by May 22.
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