DISA to piggyback on ITES-2S
By Josh Rogin
Published on April 9, 2007
The Defense Information Systems Agency won’t issue a request for proposals for its Service-Oriented Architecture Foundation (SOAF) project, as it originally announced. To avoid a possible protest and speed the process, DISA will fund the project using the Army’s Information Technology Enterprise Solutions-2 Services contract vehicle.
DISA Director Lt. Gen. Charles Croom and Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Steven Boutelle announced in a press release April 6 that SOAF would be funded through ITES-2S. DISA and the Army decided ITES-2S was sufficiently broad and flexible to satisfy the requirements to deliver SOAF services, the release states. Those services include enterprise service discovery, machine-to-machine messaging, mediation and enterprise service management.
The SOAF project will bring DISA’s Net-Centric Enterprise Services initiative to Milestone C, due by March 2008, according to a DISA spokesman. NCES reached Milestone B last month.
At their industry day last October, DISA officials had told the community that an RFP for the SOAF project was forthcoming. Some contractors have already stood up teams to develop competition strategies for the award.
But during the winter, DISA decided that a full and open competition for SOAF would make it impossible to meet the NCES deadlines, the spokesman said. Following protests of several large IT enterprise contract awards, DISA decided to remove the chance of protracted delays on NCES, he added.
“We couldn’t take the risk of [the SOAF award] being protested, because that would prevent us from reaching Milestone C,” the spokesman said.
DISA is aware that companies not party to ITES-2S might take issue with the contracting strategy, according to the spokesman. To mitigate that sentiment, the agency will actively encourage those companies to become subcontractors to ITES-2S prime vendors, he said.
“We don’t know still what the fallout might be,” the DISA spokesman said. On the upside, NCES will remain on track and the SOAF, the glue that holds NCES together, should be delivered on time, he said.
|
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
