Protests pay off for small biz bidders on this $800M Army contract

Patience is a virtue in government contracting.

In November 2020, three companies that missed out on an $800 million information systems engineering contract with the Army saw their protests dismissed by the Government Accountability Office.

The dismissal was to allow the Army to rethink its evaluations of small business awards for the Total Engineering and Integration Services IV contract.

Now and almost a year later to the day, the Army has made new awards to three companies that filed protests: Teksynap Corp., M.C. Dean Inc., and Advanced IT Concepts.

A fourth protester in IAP Worldwide has not received an award as far as we can tell. IAP was not part of the Defense Department contract award announcement from Friday that named the other companies.

We’ve reached out to IAP for comment, but so far no response. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

The protests were kicked off when the Army made awards to three large businesses: General Dynamics IT, NCI Information Systems and Science Applications International Corp. All incumbents on TEIS III, they keep their awards for the recompete as far as we can tell.

For TEIS IV, the Army said it would pick at least two small businesses as prime contractors. The protests centered in part on the Army going back on its word.

The Army uses the TEIS contract to acquire information systems engineering and IT support for the Army Information Systems Engineering Command. Services include planning, design, development, procurement, logistics, and test and evaluation.

All awardees will compete for task orders and so far none have been placed against the vehicle, according to Deltek.

GovTribe data indicates NCI has had the most success under TEIS III with $250 million in task order awards. GDIT follows with $134 million, and SAIC has pulled in $68 million.