Page 7 - FCW, October 2017
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smaller companies are valued for the innovation and flexibility they bring to IT procurement. Ensuring the small business provider network grows has become an important goal for the Army.
Traditionally, small businesses have served as subcontractors to contract primes. Over the years, though, they have complained about the amount of work they’ve been able to get that way. IT Services-Small Business (ITS-SB), for example, was structured as an adjunct to ITES-2S as an attempt to resolve that inequity.
The Army found that to be a disappointment in the end, mainly because of the much narrower scope of ITS-2B compared to
the overall ITES-2S contract. As a result, revenues from the small business contract fell far short of expectations.
NEXT MOVE
The upcoming ITES-3S, which has
a ceiling of $12 billion, has been designed to resolve that issue once and for all. Of the 24 total awards on the contract, 14 will be reserved for small businesses, which will have all of task orders that come in under $150,000 to themselves. In fiscal year 2015, the Army states it awarded a total of $17 billion in prime contracts to small business, more than any other federal agency. That total is expected to grow in the future.
The Army—and many other agencies in government—is faced with a continually changing technology landscape. And it’s changing at a much faster pace than in the past. When ITES-
2H was awarded, technology implementations and product
needs were more settled and based around three year or longer projections.
Technology requirements are now more broad and focused on such things as hyper-converged systems, where computers, servers, and storage are brought together into a single solution. The solution stays the same, insofar as it
able to accommodate changes the Army makes to requirements within an order once it’s already made. That’s not something that happens frequently, but it does happen.
The Army envisions a future in which the battlefield will be shaped by so-called “leap forward” technologies. The current push toward a secure,
The current push toward a secure, integrated, and standards-based environment will develop into an IT environment that is constantly changing to accommodate the best available technologies.
provides for a particular outcome to serve the agency mission. Within that solution, however, specific products can come
and go as better technologies are developed.
That means contractors like CDW-G need the flexibility to provide what the Army needs under ITES-
3H, says Kathy Gaston, program manager at the company. They need to be able to mix and match to provide the kinds of solutions and products the Army needs, which means partnering with OEMs. CDW-G has more than 1,800 OEM partners it can count on, so it can do that.
“That’s key for this contract,” she says. “The flexibility (in ITES-3H) is that the Army has broadened the scope of the contract enough to offer these kinds of solutions, and provide for the kind of integration work that we are good at.”
As a part of that more flexible approach, vendors also need to be
integrated, and standards-based environment will develop into an IT environment that is constantly changing to accommodate the best available technologies.
Recognizing the ITES-3H contract will provide much of
the bedrock technology for this future, the initial ITES-3H solution required contract holders to provide for possible changes, and emphasize technologies “that can be updated or enhanced in order to incorporate long-term migration strategies.”
So far, there are no specific plans for what an ITES-4H contract will encompass. The manner in which ITES-3H progresses, and the relative successful of its approach, will be a major influence on what comes next.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ON CDW-G’S OFFERINGS, PLEASE VISIT: CDWG.COM/ITES-3H.









































































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