Laura Stanton, assistant commissioner for the office of information technology category at the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), said GSA is looking to integrate key features to the Polaris governmentwide acquisition contract for small IT businesses.
Those features include on-ramps, access to emerging technologies and no-price awards with pricing negotiated at the task order level to drive competition, Stanton wrote in a blog post published Wednesday.
She said GSA also intends for Polaris to have a maximum ordering period of 10 years with no contract ceiling, utilize the cloud business model for serving offerings and provide support for IT modernization and emerging technologies, including cloud, storage and quantum computing services.
“We are developing a dynamic contracting program that provides flexibility to establish additional industry partner pools on Polaris in the future as we continue to assess technology trends and changing customer needs,” Stanton noted.
She said GSA is seeking insights from VETS 2 industry partners about including a pool for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses on Polaris, which will include cybersecurity and supply chain risk management requirements.
Stanton added that the agency is working to release an updated draft solicitation for Polaris scorecard and sections L and M and plans to hold an industry forum on the contract on Oct. 20.
In December, GSA released a draft request for proposals for Polaris and announced that the contract will be divided into three pools: small business, HUBZone and women-owned small business pools.
