The General Services Administration will begin next year consolidating eight different databases containing information about contractors — everything from solicitation data and contract award amounts to rosters of suspended contractors — into a single database powered by open-source software.Federal Times reports that GSA will begin making progress next year on the System for Award Management, or SAM, which aims to be one-stop shopping for federal contract information.
IBM has developed the architecture and requirements for the first couple stages of the rollout, Federal Times reports. However, GSA’s development bids call for open and public software solutions — a.k.a open source.
“Managing it as an open-source project is intended to improve the competition through the life of the project,” Chris Fornecker, chief of GSA’s Acquisition Systems Division, told Federal Times.
