Unisys takes last major Census tech contract

Unisys has won a three-year, $102 million contract to deploy the IT infrastructure across field sites in support of the 2020 Census.

Census Bureau officials announced the award Friday at their latest quarterly program management review meeting to publicly discuss testing progress and other high-level updates on the 2020 Census. Pending protests, this wraps up more than $2 billion in IT contracts related to the decennial Census.

Unisys will be responsible for all IT equipment, logistics, maintenance and other support services such as on-site help desk and systems administration to regional Census offices, data capture centers and remote workers.

The bureau awarded the contract on Aug. 1 and received two other offers, according to the Federal Procurement Data System that tracks contracting obligations. A Unisys representative declined to comment.

After numerous delays, the “Field IT Deployment” contract was the remaining big-ticket acquisition of IT services to support the 2020 Census, plus the testing and other preparation work leading up to it.

A contract for the majority of printing and mailing services should see a new solicitation sometime this month with an award anticipated for November, according to presentation slides from the PMR event. The Census Bureau terminated its original $61 million award to Cenveo after the company reached a settlement agreement with creditors in July on its bankruptcy case.

Census officials broke out the major IT services contracts into seven awards for nearly every technology-related aspect ranging from systems integration to mobile devices, as well as fingerprinting and badging.

T-Rex Corp. holds the $890 million systems integration job, the largest IT Census-related IT contract. The most recent contract for fingerprinting and badging went to Indrasoft in November for a $64.8 million ceiling value.

CDW-G will provide mobile devices for field data collection operations under the “Decennial Device as a Service” contract, while General Dynamics and its acquired CSRA business will help with the call center and recruiting aspects.