What You Don’t Know About the Pentagon’s DEOS Contract
Casimiro PT/Shutterstock
By
Frank Konkel
The Pentagon’s other multibillion cloud contract has gone through some major changes in the last year.
While the Pentagon’s high-profile Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure procurement is stalled over legal action, contracting officials are close to bidding out its other multibillion cloud procurement, the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract.
Officials are currently reviewing feedback from industry through a draft solicitation for DEOS the General Services Administration and Defense Department released last month.
Depending upon responses, GSA—which, in a change announced last fall, is running the procurement—will soon issue a second draft solicitation or simply bid DEOS out.
Yet, DEOS is only the first phase of the Defense Department’s three-phase Enterprise Collaboration and Productivity Services, or ECAPS.
According to the draft solicitation, the DEOS portion of ECAPS, referred to as “capability set 1,” will cover an enterprise productivity suite, messaging, content management and collaboration services. A GSA spokesperson clarified to Nextgov that capability sets 2 and 3 will be met through “future acquisitions,” meaning they will not be bid out under DEOS.
“Future acquisitions are in planning stages for capability sets two, which will include business voice and video, and capability set three, which will include assured voice,” the GSA spokesperson said.
The company or team that wins DEOS, however, can’t simply ignore the other capability sets. Their solution may need to interoperate with them, the GSA spokesperson added.
The Defense Information Systems Agency placed an $8 billion estimated ceiling value on DEOS last spring, but GSA and the Defense Department did not include an estimated price tag for the new version of DEOS in its recent draft solicitation.
DEOS will be a single-award, firm-fixed-price blanket purchase agreement, with a five-year base period with two 2-year options and a 1-year option—a potential 10-year total period of performance. The DEOS solution must scale to support than 3 million military personnel, and it will be deployed on the NIPRNet and SIPRNet—the Pentagon’s unclassified and classified networks—so the winning vendor’s cloud solution must be able to meet Impact Level 5 and 6 security requirements.
A GSA spokesperson said the agency “does not have a preference” whether cloud service providers—like Microsoft, which is considered the favorite for DEOS because of its Office 365 suite—or eligible teams of systems integrators bid on the contract, so long as they maintain a GSA Schedule 70 contract.
Cloud service providers Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, IBM and Google each have a Schedule 70 contract, as do integrators like General Dynamics Information Technology, Leidos, Perspecta and others.