Deadline looms for Army's ACCENT cloud on-ramp

The Army is moving full-steam ahead with its ACCENT on-ramp procurement with proposals due Nov. 8.

Recently released question-and-answer documents for the $250 million contract indicate there were are no major red flags. Most of the questions dealt with clarifications on proposals requirements, but nothing that would make you think there were potential problem.

The Army is using the contract for cloud migration services and cloud hosting.

Technically these are basic ordering agreements, or BOAs.

The first set of ACCENT awards were made in February 2017 and went to 50 companies. The first on-ramp was awarded to 18 companies in March 2018. The Army has not set a number of awards for the second on-ramp. Awards for the second on ramp are expected around March 2019.

A range of large, midsize and small businesses have all won spots on the vehicle, through which they sell cloud-related services to the Army. These services include general cloud capabilities such as on-demand cloud capacity, network access, resource pooling, IT security, and other services needed to move applications and data to the commercial cloud.

According to Deltek, more than $3.1 million in task orders have been awarded through ACCENT.

The Army has touted ACCENT as a flexible vehicle because of the broad range of services. And with the large number primes there should be plenty of competition.