Federal officials said agencies should consider modifying their solicitations under the $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract to meet their telecommunications and other information technology requirements during the coronavirus pandemic, FedScoop reported Friday.
“This is a chance for the agencies to take a look and see where there might be gaps in what they were rolling out and look to expand their EIS solicitations,” Laura Stanton, incoming acting assistant commissioner of information technology category at the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, said Thursday at an AFFIRM webinar. “Agencies were in different places and were affected differently by COVID-19.”
Mike Maiorana, senior vice president of federal public sector sales at Verizon and a previous Wash100 Award winner, said agencies are making some changes to their solicitations and those include boosting bandwidth for data and voice networks to support telework, distance learning and telemedicine; cloud-based collaboration platforms for workforce productivity; and security support to safeguard against cyber threats.
“We have seen certain agencies delay EIS deadlines and/or decisions to focus more on the urgent matters at hand,” Maiorana said. “We have seen other agencies accelerate solicitations to use EIS as an enabler of technologies to assist their COVID-19 responses.”
