GSA completes initial agency telecom inventory
As GSA awaits bids for its next-generation telecom contract, it completed an important inventory of services that federal agencies are using under current contracts.
The General Services Administration's Transition Coordination Center completed initial inventory validations for agencies’ telecommunications services on Jan. 29, said Mary Davie, assistant commissioner of GSA's Office of Integrated Technology Services. The validations are an initial milestone on the road to moving the government to the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract by 2017.
In a Feb. 4 blog post, Davie said the inventory validations are crucial to addressing one of the government's top priorities in 2016: transitioning from the expiring Networx and regional telecom contracts to EIS. The validations clarify and confirm the services agencies are currently using so they can plan ahead for what they will need under the EIS contract.
Agencies must use the validations to complete their transition plans, which are due to GSA by October 2016.
GSA's transition work is aimed at preventing the complications that prolonged the switch to Networx, which took three years longer than anticipated.
By today's count, there are more than 7 million service instances that must be transitioned to EIS before the current contracts expire in May 2020.
Debbie Hren, GSA's network services transition director for EIS, said in October 2015 that she was gathering inventory data from federal agencies' nooks and crannies, including from 200 components of the Department of Homeland Security and 100 American Indian tribes that use the contract for telephone services.
Without such detail, Hren said smaller agency components might wind up without basic telephone and other services when the new contract kicks in.