Now officially open: the Patent and Trademark Office's $2B BOSS software contract
By
Nick Wakeman
The Patent & Trademark Office has prevailed over several protestors who challenged the awards made under its $2 billion PTO Business Oriented Software Solutions vehicle.
The Patent and Trademark Office has officially prevailed against a second group of protestors that challenged the agency's awards for its $2 billion PTO Business Oriented Software Solutions vehicle.
Now that the Government Accountability Office has released its 30-page denial, PTO is free to begin awarding task orders under the vehicle.
Small businesses whose protests were denied are:
- Stratera Fulcrum Technologies
- M6-Vets
- Metric 8
- MERPTech LLC
- RCH Partners LLC
That group of small business protesters challenged the awards to RIVA Solutions, Halvik Corp. and Steampunk.
Salient CRGT's protest was denied earlier in the summer. That company competed in the full-and-open portion and challenged the awards to Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corp.
Salient CRGT argued the comparative analysis among the three large businesses was unreasonable and not adequately documented. The analysis wasn’t consistent with the terms of the solicitation, according to the company.
GAO disagreed and ruled in PTO’s favor.
Booz Allen and SAIC are the only two large businesses on the contract.
An earlier protest by General Dynamics IT was withdrawn by that company.
Work areas for BOSS include software development and integration, testing, configuration management, production, software maintenance and transition, and program management. Companies will also vie to help in architecture and design, coding, defect triaging and user experience design.
The contract was awarded in April.