“This is vastly different from anything you’ve ever seen before,†said GSA representative today at DISA & GSA’s 3rd Industry Day. The two organizations invited media and industry to attend the Future COMSATCOM Services Acquisition (FCSA) End-to-End Solutions Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) Draft RFP Industry Day this morning, April 7, 2010 at the GSA building on 1800 F. Street.Today’s Industry Day revealed how the GSA and DISA are planning on purchasing future commercial satellite end-to-end solutions from industry. There were two draft RFP’s that were introduced this morning. There is one full and open competition RFP for large-scale requirements and one RFP restricted to small businesses.
How are these RFP’s vastly different from anything in the past? They are fair and open for competition. The purpose of having 3 contracts is to give industry the ability to compete against each other. They are flexible; the mission is evolving.
The name that was revealed today for the FCSA ID/IQ is Custom SATCOM Solutions (CS2). Some of the highlights of CS2 are that customers will define the requirements and contractors will engineer customer solutions. There will be full and open for large-scale requirements and small business set-asides.
GSA representatives spoke on a variety of different solution attributes or requirements such as portability, security, and capacity (in terms of location and amount) for the DOD and government customers. They also hit on the variety of solution types such as interactive services, continuity of operations, broadcast satellite services, emergency responder operations, direct warfighter operations, and steady state operations.
Industry Day also revealed the purpose and details of the Sample Task Orders. The three categories of sample task orders are distance learning, blue personnel tracking, and disaster response commercial infrastructure. The difference between the samples is complexity.
The proposals will be evaluated on technical and management evaluation, past performance, and price. The number of contracts that will be awarded was not stated as this depends on the number of contract proposals received as well as the quality of these proposals. While the next Industry Day will focus on submission requirements of the proposal, they mentioned anyone can start today by making sure they can login to the secure portal. The FCSA Hosting Center requires a digital certificate and each proposal needs both a hard and soft copy submission.
The final ID/IQ RFP will be launched this summer after feedback has been taken into account. Awards will be given out in 2011. Feedback and recommendations for the RFP’s are due by April 21st no later than 3 pm to futurecomsatcom@gsa.gov. The RFP’s are posted on www.fbo.gov.
