Small firm picked for $82.8M USCIS info sharing infrastructure contract

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency has chosen a small business to help modernize and roll out an IT infrastructure to enable sharing of information across USCIS.

Fairfax, Virginia-based Alethix has won a potential $82.8 million contract to update the agency’s enterprise service bus and also build a new electronic case processing system, according to a Sept. 26 contracting notice in the Federal Procurement Data System.

Alethix was one of 20 bidders for the Enterprise Gateway and Integration Services contract, or EGIS, that covers work over one initial base year and potentially two option years. USCIS awarded the contract through the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70 vehicle.

EGIS is the replacement for the Business Enterprise Services Technologies contract, or BEST, with only small businesses eligible to compete just like the second iteration of BEST that was won by Computer World Services in 2014 and expired in June 2019.

Solicitation documents indicate one of the requirements for EGIS is to migrate functionality currently residing in on-premise servers into those hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, which means a shift away from the prior middleware-centric setup.

Other objectives include converting the functionality to a microservice-based architecture, where applications are structured as collections of loosely coupled services with low degrees of interdependence.

Alethix is an 8(a) small disadvantage business and an 8(m) economically disadvantaged woman-owned small business founded in 2012.