Alliant awards spark little surprise

Alliant has been awarded -- now what?

Going through the list of winners yesterday brought only momentary surprises. We thought a couple major companies had missed the cut, only to realize they were listed under older names, such as Northrop Grumman Corp. coming in under TASC, or SRA International being listed as Systems Research and Applications Corp.

Right now it looks like most of the major players won, but there were 66 bidders and only 29 winners. I'm not great at math, but I think that means there are about 37 disappointed companies. That's a lot. We're going to be looking for some of them and seeing what this loss means. If you have any tips on who these companies are let me know -- anonymously through the comment feature of this blog or you can e-mail me directly at nwakeman@1105govinfo.com.

A question I have going forward with Alliant is who will make the best use of it? It is a broad contract with a high ceiling. Like some of the contracts it consolidates, Alliant should have some task orders measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It is going to be an important vehicle for contractors trying to hold on to market share as well as companies trying to capture market share.

The Alliant announcement came just as we were going to press with our Aug. 6 issue, so we only have a short story in that edition, but look for more analysis in the Aug. 20 issue. In the meantime, we want to hear what you think about Alliant.