Army seeks proposals for ITES-2H

The Army Small Computer Program has issued its request for proposals for the Information Technology Enterprise Solutions-2 Hardware (ITES-2H) contract vehicle. The awards will be worth $5 billion in a five-year period.

ITES-2H will provide servers, storage and other related components for IT infrastructure and server consolidation throughout the Army. It complements the ITES -2 Services contract, awarded in April. ITES-2S is currently stalled pending the resolution of protests filed by five losing vendors.

ITES-2H is meant to provide the hardware to enable ITES-2S solutions, and vendors will be required to use ITES-2H products, said Kevin Carroll, program executive officer at the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO-EIS).

PEO-EIS, along with the Army Contracting Agency’s IT, E-Commerce and Commercial Contracting Center and Network Enterprise Technology Command, will issue the awards.

The ITES-2H contract length is shorter than the contract length of ITES-2S, which plans to distribute $20 billion in awards in nine years. This is because of the more volatile nature of the hardware industry, Carroll said.

“Although the contracts allow new technology to come in all the time, the companies that are in that business, sometimes in five years you get a little shake out,” he said. Most hardware contracts have a similar timeline, he added.

The schedule calls for ITES-2H awards to be issued within four to six months, Carroll said. Work on ITES-2S should resume by then. The Government Accountability Office must issue its recommendation regarding the ITES-2S protests by November.