State Department offers glimpse of $8B IT services contract

Industry is got a more detailed glimpse at a five-year, $8 billion contract for IT services to the State Department ahead of an event held Oct. 25 to discuss the procurement.

With this draft request for proposals released Thursday, the department’s office of information resource management also known as IRM indicates it intends to double the ceiling value from the previously-indicated $4 billion figure.

This multiple-award contract called "Evolve" is the successor to the Vanguard contract held by Science Applications International Corp. since 2010, according to Deltek data.

Awards will be broken out into these five pools or service areas: IT management, network and telecommunications, cloud computing and data centers, application development, and customer and end user services.

Pool 3 covering cloud and data center services is reserved for small businesses only, while the other four pools are full-and-open for all to bid as a prime contractor.

Companies should pay attention to this first rule of the road for EVOLVE: vendors in the IT management pool may not deliver services in the other four pools, or have partnerships or subcontracts with vendors providing services in said four pools.

Rule number two to take heed of is a vendor can only provide services as a prime contractor across no more than two pools.

This article was originally published in Washington Technology, a Defense Systems partner site.