Solers joins crowd in $7.5B SETI contract

At least one of four successful protestors has won a spot on DISA’s $7.5 billion Systems Engineering, Technology and Innovation contract, known as SETI.

DISA on Wednesday added Solers Inc. to the full and open portion of the contract. It’ll now compete with 14 other companies who won the contract in June.

Solers and three others – Novetta, Technatomy, and OGSystems – filed protests with the Government Accountability Office and GAO ruled in their favor.

However, GAO made four different decisions because each company’s protest was just unique enough that GAO couldn’t bundle them into a single decision.

The rulings were released simultaneously in October.

The GAO decision recommends that DISA re-evaluate the bids based on the GAO findings, which were different for each company.

In Solers’ case, DISA had to re-examine Solers under Factor 1 of the solicitation – Innovation, and for how it conducted the best value tradeoff evaluation.

For Novetta, GAO told DISA to look at innovation, best value and for a weakness DISA found in its response to Factor 3 for solutions to problems 1 and 2 in the solicitation.

GAO wanted DISA to look at Technomy’s prices. And OGSystems got a second look for its innovation and the best-value tradeoff decision DISA made.

I expect we’ll see other DISA awards in the near future.

Getting on the contract is just step one, now comes the competition for task orders.

With the addition of Solers, there are now 15 companies on SETI, and quite possibly three more to come.

DISA is still evaluating the small business track of the SETI vehicle.