State cancels $2.1B HITSS 2 contract
By
Nick Wakeman
State Department cancels it's $2.1 billion HITSS 2 procurment and instead will use the GSA schedule to buy a variety of IT products and services from small businesses.
The State Department has canceled its $2.1 billion Hybrid IT Services for State 2 contract, known as HITSS 2. Instead it’ll issue a small business contract using the General Services Administration’s IT schedule.
The first HITSS contract was a small business contract held by 20 companies. For each of the last four years more than $200 million in task orders went through the vehicle. More than $1 billion has been spent throughout the life of contract, which was awarded in 2007, according to data from the market research firm Deltek.
In its short announcement, the State Department didn’t explain its rationale for the change in strategy.
Among the top contractors on HITSS is Creative Information Technology Inc. with $286.2 million in task orders, AGTECH with $180.3 million, and Pragmatics with $131.9 million. They were the only companies with more than $100 million in task orders, according to Deltek.
According to the statement of work included when the presolicitation was released in August, the contract was to be used to supply people and services in areas such as systems and software analysis and development; document analysis, development of systems design documents; computer programming; computer center operations; configuration management; software maintenance, testing, and troubleshooting; computer security; technical writing; training; and word processing.
The notice of cancelation did not include a time frame for when the State Department would begin its new competition via the GSA schedule. The notice only says “at a future date.”