Denials open the door for $2B PTO vehicle
By
Nick Wakeman
The Patent and Trademark Office can now open its $2 billion BOSS software services contract for business now that several protestors have lost their fight over not getting chosen.
The Government Accountability Office has denied a group of protests, which the Patent & Trademark Office to move ahead with its $2 billion Business Oriented Software Solutions vehicle.
BOSS' five winners are now able to vie for task orders nearly four months after they received awards.
Three of them are small businesses -- Halvik Corp., Riva Solutions and Steampunk. The two large business awardees are Science Applications International Corp. and Booz Allen Hamilton.
PTO received 24 bids in total for the contract that covers services including software development and integration, testing, configuration management, production, software maintenance and transition and program management.
Seven companies filed protests. One of those in General Dynamics IT withdrew early on. Six others continued until all of their protests were denied last month.
The Government Accountability Office's denial Salient CRGT’s protest came first and is the only one publicly available today. Still sealed are the rulings against the protests of Metric 8, M-6 Vets LLC, RCH Partners, Stratera Fulcrum Technologies and MERPTech.
But we know all the companies challenged how the evaluation was conducted.
Salient CRGT argued the comparative analysis of proposals and the source selection decisions were inconsistent with the solicitation. The company said more weight was given to the past performance factor and the program management and staffing factor, which led PTO to give a higher score to SAIC.
PTO argued it followed the parameters set out in the solicitation and provided documentation to GAO supporting that claim. Another plus for SAIC was that its small business plan was stronger and SB participation was a critical evaluation criteria, according to GAO.
The remaining protest decisions will likely be released in the coming weeks. GAO generally bundles similar cases into one decision, but the Salient CRGT protest stands out because it was focused on the BOSS competition's full-and-open track.
The other protests were all by small businesses and likely will be part of a single decision, given that GAO's docket indicates they all were denied on the same date of July 29.
But regardless if GAO issues one decision or multiple decisions, the result is the same -- the original five winners are now free to compete for task orders under the $2 billion vehicle.
Almost a year before PTO made awards, the agency successfully defended itself against a pair of protests by two companies who claimed they were improperly eliminated from the competition. But PTO operates under its own set of procurement rules, so GAO ruled it did not have jurisdiction over that matter.