State Department offers glimpse of $8B IT services contract ahead of industry day
By
Ross Wilkers
The State Department's industry day for this multiple-award, $8 billion IT services contract is just around the corner and the agency already has an idea of how it wants to divide up the work.
Industry is getting a more detailed glimpse at a five-year, $8 billion contract for IT services to the State Department ahead of an event slated for Monday to discuss the procurement.
With this draft request for proposals released Thursday, the department’s office of information resource management also known as IRM indicates it intends to double the ceiling value from the previously-indicated $4 billion figure.
The industry day for this multiple-award contract called “Evolve” will take place Monday for interested companies to put in their questions about it. Evolve is the successor to the Vanguard contract held by Science Applications International Corp. since 2010, according to Deltek data.
Awards will be broken out into these five pools or service areas: IT management, network and telecommunications, cloud computing and data centers, application development, and customer and end user services.
Pool 3 covering cloud and data center services is reserved for small businesses only, while the other four pools are full-and-open for all to bid as a prime contractor.
Companies should pay attention to this first rule of the road for EVOLVE: vendors in the IT management pool may not either deliver services in the other four pools, or have partnerships or subcontracts with vendors providing services in said four pools.
Rule number two to take heed of is a vendor can only provide services as a prime contractor across no more than two pools.