FAA lifts curtains on multi-billion dollar IT product vehicle
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By
Ross Wilkers
The Federal Aviation Administration is clear that customized technology is not what it wants.
The Federal Aviation Administration is now asking for industry input on its plans to develop a potential 10-year contract vehicle for acquiring commercially available IT products and services.
In a Sam.gov notice posted Friday, the FAA pegged the contract's ceiling value as ranging between $5 billion and $10 billion for technical and professional support work covering the full lifecycle management of IT assets.
Commercial-off-the-shelf products are the FAA's priority for this acquisition, to the point that the agency has this sentence in the request for information:
"The anticipated contracts will NOT (all-caps emphasis theirs) include non-COTS software items and software development for COTS items."
Small businesses are being encouraged to respond to the notice, particularly those with the service-disabled, veteran-owned and 8(a) designations.
Each award will be of a firm-fixed price nature with economic price adjustments, the latter of which has become a key contractual item some companies have sought as a means to better manage increasing costs in the current inflation environment.
The FAA's notice calls out network infrastructure components, personal computing devices, computer peripherals and accessories, audio/visual equipment, software to support the equipment and cloud-based services as areas of interest.
Responses to the request for information are due Jan. 6.