Alliant 2 opens market to new challengers

The General Services Administration cannot proceed with the $50 billion Alliant 2 Unrestricted contract for IT services quite yet until the resolution of several protests by March.

But while GSA and industry await those outcomes, a new report from Govini posted Tuesday highlights the stakes of being selected or not for Alliant 2 and who may be best positioned to capture business on the new vehicle when it is opened to agencies.

Govini is a big data and analytics company that seeks to help customers make sense of public sector spending information.

Companies repositioning themselves in the federal IT landscape could be formidable competitors when Alliant 2 goes live, according to Govini’s latest report.

Those contractors Govini identified in its “High Growth and Emerging” category include AECOM, Deloitte, Jacobs Engineering Group, ManTech International and Parsons Corp.

Within Alliant 2’s scope of IT services, that group captured 7.5 percent or $1.2 billion of all obligations that went to the contract’s top 25 awardees. They also face the most competition with an average of three bids per award, according to Govini.

Alliant 2’s scope of technologies includes areas such as cloud, cyber, big data, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence -- all of which several members in that group have made acquisitions in the market’s ongoing hectic deals environment or other internal investments to align with agencies’ goals for IT modernization.

“The category includes contractors that have roots in infrastructure and architecture engineering, which provides a competitive advantage in certain leading-edge technologies such as IoT where infrastructure will be augmented to have smart sensing capabilities,” Govini analyst Matt Hummer told me via email.

Deloitte’s deals in the past two years have included last year’s addition of Heat for new mainframe support and coding services, plus the pickup of innoWake earlier this year for more legacy IT modernization capabilities. ManTech also grew its IT modernization footprint with the $180 million Infozen acquisition.

Then there are the moves the infrastructure companies Jacobs and Parsons have made to add IT business in their federal portfolios as part of an overall “operational technology” concept.

Jacobs acquired Blue Canopy in September for new Internet of Things-related services and Parsons bought Williams Electric to gain new work in energy control systems and integrate that into cybersecurity offerings.

Parsons is a newcomer to Alliant 2 and the other four are incumbents from the original Alliant 1.