Troubles continue for Army's $5B ADMC 3 contract

The $5 billion Army Desktop and Mobile Computing 3 contract continues to see difficulty in pulling away from protest troubles.

We last reported in July that the Court of Federal Claims put an injunction on the Army, which was trying to reopen discussions with bidders. The Army wanted to take a corrective action to address concerns raised in 21 protests filed after the Army named its nine winners. Essentially, the Army wanted to reopen the competition.

Several winners including Dell claimed that reopening the competition would put them at a disadvantage because their pricing information had been exposed.

The court agreed and stopped the Army’s corrective action.

Now in the past 10 days, 12 companies have refiled bid protests with the Government Accountability Office. They are still trying to gain a foothold on the contract.

It is hard to tell what exactly has changed since July. There doesn’t appear to be another round of awards. The protesters are likely trying to use something in the Court of Federal Claims decision to influence GAO.

There is a chance that the Army has simply reinstated the original winners but there has been no announcement. And a source questioned whether GAO has the authority to hear more protests given the court decision.

So we’ll be watching this one. Protests were filed over the last week to 10 days. GAO will need to decide what it can do with them, given the court decision.

This contract has been problematic since the Army made awards in February to nine companies. The contract is for hardware and software and is the third iteration of the ADMC program. This time around, the Army nixed several incumbents and large businesses such as HP Inc., CDW-G and Insight Public Sector.

In fact, Dell was the only large business on the list of winners.

The 12 protesters are: CredoGov, HPI Federal, Transource Services Corp., Koi Computers, FCN Inc., Integration Technologies Group, ACE Computers, Telos Corp., CounterTrade Products, FedBiz IT Solutions, New Tech Solutions and CDW-G.

GAO has until Dec. 11 to make a decision.

The nine winners are Blue Tech Inc., Iron Bow, Red River, Intelligent Decisions, NCS Technologies, Dell, Strategic Communications, GovSmart and Ideal Solutions. Only Dell and NCS are incumbents on ADMC 2.