Objectives revised for $10B NIH CIO-CS contract

The National Institutes of Health has released a new statement of objectives for the $10 billion Chief Information Officer – Commodity Solutions contract that expands the number of product categories and changes the cloud services to be offered.

The CIO-CS contract will replace the Electronic Commodities Store III contract, a 10-year, $10 billion vehicle with 40 prime contractors. It is being extended another year until the new contract is in place.

During fiscal 2012, $361.2 million in task orders went through the ECS contract, according to information from the market research firm Deltek. Some of the top contractors on the vehicle include Government Acquisitions Inc., CDW-G, Dell, Iron Bow Technologies and World Wide Technology.

In the revised statement of objectives, released April 18, NIH expanded the product categories from four to nine. The new categories are:

• End user hardware commodities
• Telecommunication plans
• End user telecommunications hardware
• End user software commodities
• IT security commodities
• Enterprise wide software commodities
• On-premise infrastructure
• Infrastructure and platform as a service
• Health and biomedical research IT commodities

The statement of objectives includes examples of the types of products under each category.

NIH wants contractors to propose delivering these commodities via an on-premise model, a managed services model or both.

Another change in the statement of objectives is the handling of cloud services. In the original statement of work released in March, NIH was asking for a public cloud model as one way to deliver the products and services.

In the revised statement of work, it instead describes a managed services model that includes the use of a public cloud.

NIH is collecting comments on the draft request for proposals through April 22. A final RFP is expected in late May or June.