Army explores new $15B ITES contract

The Army issued a request for information this week as it began preparation for the third generation of the Information Technology Enterprise Solutions contract, commonly called ITES.

The current ITES Services 2 contract expires in 2015. The Army is estimating that ITES-3 Services will be worth between $11 billion and $15 billion over five years.

The RFI includes a questionnaire asking questions such as:

• The ability to work worldwide, including hostile areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Providing services for IT products already in inventory.
• Experience working with government or commercial customers.
• Suggestions for task areas and labor categories.

The due date for responses is Feb. 21.

The Army apparently is debating whether to structure ITES 3 as a single, multiple-award contract, or as a group of contracts tied to a task area or IT taxonomy. The government asks about such a structure in question 13 where they want suggestions on how task areas should be grouped. They also want to know if there are benefits to breaking up the contract for industry and government.

The RFI includes a list of task areas under consideration for the contract. These include:

• Business process reengineering
• Information systems security
• Information assurance
• IT services
• Enterprise design, integration and consolidation
• Education and training
• Program and project management
• Systems operation and maintenance
• Network support

The RFI also has a long list of labor categories.

The ITES contracts have been important vehicles for some of the largest contractors in the market. General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman each have won more than $1 billion in task orders under the vehicle, according to data from Deltek.

Since 2006, more than $7 billion in task orders have gone through ITES-2 Services, with the majority of that coming since 2009. In fiscal 2011 and 2012, task orders topped $1.8 billion in each year, according to Deltek.