Listen carefully and you can hear the buzz in the federal market about a new contract from the General Services Administration.
It’s not another big governmentwide contract like Alliant 3 or the ASCEND cloud blanket purchase agreement.
This one is the second generation of the COMET blanket purchase agreement that is going to be used only by GSA.
“GSA saying this contract is a modernization effort and I think that is drawing a lot of interest from a lot of companies. I also think a lot of companies under COMET didn’t have capabilities to bid back in 2019,” said Gissa Sateri, the director of the civilian business unit at SAIC. “I think industry will go after COMET II wholeheartedly as a lot of companies who were subcontractors under COMET will now try to be a prime contractor. The pool of bidders is going to be huge.
SAIC, which won a spot on COMET and plans to bid on COMET II, was one of about 400 companies at the industry day for the BPA last December.
COMET blasted through expectations
GSA awarded COMET in October 2019 to 12 companies for a range of IT services focused only on the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS). COMET replaced the CIO Application Maintenance, Enhancements, and Operations (CAMEO) procurement that GSA awarded in 2014 to a host of large and small businesses with a total ceiling of $400 million.
COMET was so successful that GSA on-ramped several new small businesses after the initial awardees grew too big.
Industry sources say GSA has awarded almost $1 billion under COMET since 2019.
These same sources say they expect COMET II to be a $2 billion vehicle and open for use by anyone at GSA from the Public Building Service to FAS to the Office of Governmentwide Policy, which is a main reason why it’s attracting so much interest.
“GSA really liked the dynamic of COMET. After reading full draft RFP, I get the sense they want to have something similar because of its success and they are forward thinking and asking what the technology roadmap would look like in the next five years,” said Robin Gardner, the GSA account manager for CGI, which also is a COMET BPA holder and plans to bid on COMET II. “GSA has their whole IT playbook and it has been developing the document over last five years. When looking at that as a roadmap, it’s clear it has grown and improved with more definitions for vendors to figure out what technology can be brought into the fold. I think COMET II will be a more robust vehicle that addresses more opportunities they have over next five years with new technologies like artificial intelligence.”
GSA is expected to make 20 awards under COMET II, 10 in the small business pool and 10 in the unrestricted pool. Previously, GSA chose small businesses for about 25% of all awards.
More details out for bidders
GSA recently gave vendors more details about its plans for COMET II, releasing another draft of the performance work statement as well as the drafts of how they will evaluate bids.
Vendors say they had been waiting on GSA to provide this level of detail around the evaluation factors under COMET II, which may start to whittle down the number of perspective bidders.
Gardner said understanding Sections L and M of the draft solicitation will help industry better address the requirements and have a clearer picture of what GSA will be looking for in the bids.
One industry executive, who requested anonymity because their company plans on bidding on COMET II and is familiar with COMET, said there are several key differences between the BPAs.
For example, the new draft BPA has a bigger emphasis on building applications that are cloud native versus under COMET the focus was on building cloud ready applications.
Another area where GSA wants vendors to focus more on in COMET II is human centered design. The industry executive said GSA didn’t even mention HCD in the initial BPA, but now it’s a distinguished as a requirement for all task orders, and it’s included as one of nine technical objectives.
Two other key differences between COMET and COMET II is the focus on small business subcontracting and the requirement for vendors to have two special item numbers (SINs) instead of just one.
Can COMET II stay out of protest purgatory?
COMET II includes a 20% small business requirement at the task order level.
The industry source added companies also must have both the IT SIN and cloud SIN under COMET II. Under COMET, vendors just needed the IT SIN.
“One of reasons for bringing in the cloud SIN may be to open it up more and other contractors instead of just the usual system integrators,” the executive said. “All incumbents have both SINs and anyone looking at this should’ve had time to get both SINs.”
As part of the new documents GSA released last week, vendors received the draft task orders too. Three of them were for IAE projects, while another was for the recompete of the Hailey’s COMET program and the other was for e-commerce tools and capabilities.
CGI’s Gardner said this is another area where GSA altered its plans with COMET II. Vendors must bid on the BPA, but don’t have to necessarily bid on all five task orders. But, she said, GSA has left the option open to award all five task orders as part of making final awards under COMET II.
With the expansion of COMET II and the heavy interest in by contractors, several vendors said they are concerned the BPA could get caught in protest purgatory.
Another industry source said GSA’s communications have been a bit stilted under COMET II so far, especially compared to COMET.
“GSA asked for feedback and they said they would have one on ones. The last time the one on ones were meaningful. This time, they just read back to you what you submitted and whether they would take it under consideration. The community felt like it was a waste of time,” said the source. “We submitted a lot of feedback and it got to point of them saying they wouldn’t read the rest and just take them under advisement. Another mistake was they said they would publish feedback on ebuy and many of us were not happy about that because we submitted proprietary information. I think a lot of folks raised concerns and GSA decided not to do that after all.”
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