With protest fight over, Govplace proceeds on $109M USCIS commercial cloud contract

Govplace has secured a potential four-year, $109 million blanket purchase agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to help that agency host its data in multiple commercial cloud environments.

USCIS tasked the IT product reseller and systems integrator to provide an on-demand catalog of current and new commercial cloud service providers that are authorized under the governmentwide FedRAMP program.

Reston, Virginia-based Govplace said in a release Tuesday that solutions available to USCIS will include infrastructure-, platform-, and software-as-a-service offerings.

The company was first awarded the contract in July over seven other bidders but the win was held up by a protest from JHC Technology, which objected to its exclusion after an initial round of evaluations that narrowed the competition from eight companies to three for the final award.

GAO released a redacted version of its ruling on Oct. 30 that also explained what USCIS is looking for in this procurement that involved a two-step evaluation process.

Step one was intended to gauge the number and acceptability of quoted cloud offerings, plus whether the prices were fair and reasonable. Vendors were gauged on the attributes of each product offering, a pass/fail rating of each product offering, and total number of product offerings with a pass rating.

Quotations had to include the Twilio and CloudCheckr clouds, at least three infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service offerings including Amazon Web Services US East/West, and six software-as-a-service offerings.

For step two, the agency evaluated the remaining three vendors’ quoted discounts on historical prices for AWS cloud services. The final award would go to the vendor with the lowest overall price based on that methodology.

Prices were redacted from the GAO decision, but JGC was adjudged to be the second-highest vendor eliminated in step one and hence fifth-highest overall.