NASA chooses small biz joint venture for $814M IT contract
Gettyimages.com / Weiquan Lin
By
Ross Wilkers
This is the most recent of several awards by NASA to push toward an agency-wide model of acquiring IT support.
NASA has awarded a potential $814 million contract to a joint venture of Rothe Development and Ares Technical Services Corp. for IT and digital communication services to all agency centers and headquarters.
Rothe Ares Joint Venture will work with NASA's offices of its chief information officer and communications for up to approximately eight years, the space agency said Tuesday.
The Enterprise Multimedia and Integrated Technical Services contract's scope of work includes customer collaboration and support, information management, television and multimedia production, social media, and digital exhibits. NASA awarded eMITS as a small business set-aside.
Work will take place over an initial 90-day phase-in that starts May 2, followed by one initial base year, then up to seven individual option years and a potential six-month extension after that.
The eMITS contract is one of several efforts by NASA to transition to agency-wide service providers for both the CIO and communications organizations, as opposed to prior approaches of acquiring that support through center-level contracts.
One significant leg of that push is found in the agency's potential $1.3 billion Consolidated Applications and Platform Services contract for general IT support, which has a proposal due date of April 28. That contract called NCAPS will go to a single company.
Some of NASA's other moves to that agency-wide model include the $2.5 billion AEGIS and $2.9 billion NEST contracts held by Leidos for IT infrastructure and end-user support respectively, plus the $622 million "Cypress" award held by Booz Allen Hamilton for enterprise cybersecurity services.