New DOD cloud email award expected in early 2020

A new award for the Defense Department's commercial cloud email contract could come in late January or early February.

The General Services Administration and Defense Information Systems Agency are gearing up for a new award of the DEOS cloud email services contract in 2020.

Sources told Washington Technology that government officials have indicated a late January or early February award date for the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract valued at $7.6 billion over 10 years.

General Dynamics Information Technology won the contract in a head-to-head competition with Perspecta. Perspecta then filed a protest arguing that the technical evaluation was not properly conducted. Perspecta also claimed that GDIT had an organizational conflict of interest.

GSA and DISA then pulled the award back to take a corrective action, which includes submission of updated proposals by the two companies.

DISA and GSA have released a draft request for quotations that GDIT and Perspecta have commented on. A final RFQ has not been released yet, according to sources.

The expectation is that once the final solicitation is out, the companies will have a short window in which to turn around their proposals.

DISA and GSA have not done a wholesale rework of the solicitation, so the companies should not need to make major changes to their proposals.

DISA turned to GSA to run the DEOS program through IT Schedule 70 as a blanket purchase agreement. DEOS will be available across the Defense Department for the service branches and DOD agencies to buy email, word processing, spreadsheets, file sharing applications and storage.

DISA, GSA and both companies declined to comment for this story.