GSA Revisits Competition for $8B Cloud Contract DEOS: Top 20

The General Services Administration will allow companies to submit revised bids for a 10-year, $8 billion, cloud contract for modernized Pentagon office technology following the agency’s decision to take corrective action, according to a Government Accountability Office decision. Only companies that submitted quotes in the first, disputed process are eligible to submit revised bids.

This week’s update to Bloomberg Government’s Top 20 Opportunities focuses on Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS), a single-award, blanket purchase agreement that’s being competed through GSA’s Schedule IT-70. The contract is being established to replace the Defense Department’s legacy productivity applications, such as email and chat, with modern cloud-based systems using Microsoft’s Office 365.

GSA’s corrective action came after it awarded the contract to CSRA, a division of General Dynamics, on Aug. 29. Perspecta Inc. filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office challenging the bid evaluation and award determination on Sept. 9. After GSA made its decision to take corrective action, GAO dismissed the protest on Oct. 7.

GSA’s decision says “it will amend the the RFQ to address changes in requirements to ensure the RFQ accurately reflects the government’s current needs, and it will allow the vendors an opportunity to submit revised quotations.” The agency also said it expects to evaluate revised bids under the non-price factors of the RFQ, will conduct a new trade-off analysis to determine best value, and will either reaffirm the CSRA award or cancel the BPA and select a new award recipient.

A deadline for revised offers hasn’t yet been established.

What’s Ahead

No new companies will be eligible to compete unless the competition is canceled. Based on the contract requirements, it’s likely that only a select number of top-ranked IT providers such as such as Amazon, Google, General Dynamics Corp., Leidos Inc., Northrop Grumman Corp., Booz Allen Hamilton Corp., and others are going to be in the running.

Bloomberg Government predicts that CSRA is likely to retain the DEOS award despite the GSA’s revived evaluation.

GSA is in the midst of a similar process of reevaluating bids for the $15 billion Alliant 2 Small Business government-wide acquisition contract. Click here for more details about A2SB.

To contact the analyst: Daniel Snyder at dsnyder@bgov.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jodie Morris at jmorris@bgov.com