Pentagon re-awards multibillion-dollar office tools contract to CSRA

Andrew Eversden

WASHINGTON ― The Pentagon re-awarded its Defense Enterprise Office Solutions contract to CSRA on Friday, nearly 14 months after it awarded it to the General Dynamics Information Technology subsidiary last year.

The award to CSRA was delayed several times after the General Services Administration twice took corrective action after protests by Perspecta, the other contractor in the competition.

According to the announcement from the General Services Administration and Department of Defense, the blanket purchasing agreement is estimated to be worth $4.4 billion over a decade, with a five-year base. The contract was estimated to be worth $7.6 billion when the award was made last year.

The DEOS contract will provide the DoD with productivity tools such as word processing and spreadsheets, email, collaboration, file sharing, and storage across the enterprise.

“DEOS is a key part of the Department's Digital Modernization Strategy and its fit-for-purpose cloud offering will streamline our use of cloud email and collaborative tools while enhancing cybersecurity and information sharing based on standardized needs and market offerings,” DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said in a statement. “The last six months have put enormous pressure on the Department to move faster with cloud adoption. All across the Department there are demand signals for enterprise wide collaboration and ubiquitous access to information.”

The DEOS environment is intended to meet DoD Impact Level 5 and Impact Level 6 cloud security standards that allow access to unclassified and classified work, respectively.

"“We were determined that the Department could achieve faster department-wide adoption of cloud collaboration capabilities by moving forward in a federated manner to the DoD 365 (IL 5) cloud environment while ensuring the individual components efforts work together to create an enterprise capability,” Deasy added. “This approach required the government team to assume a greater responsibility up front to shape the enterprise standards. With the award of DEOS, the Department will be able to transfer a significant part of the ongoing technical and management load to the integrator and free up strained resources to execute other priority missions.”

The DEOS contract award was marred by several errors, detailed by NextGov, including issues with the statement of work, requirements and a subsequent incident in which proprietary information about Perspecta's bid was shared with GDIT.

CSRA is partnered with Dell Marketing and Minburn Technology Group for the DEOS contract.

DoD components have waited a long time for delivery of the DEOS solution. When the original award was made last year, the Marine Corps deputy director of command, control, communications and computers, Kenneth Bible, said the service was looking forward to the “promise and substantial benefits” of DEOS capabilities in “disconnected, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth [DDIL] environments that are anticipated in 21st century conflicts.”

The DEOS re-award comes nearly two months after the department confirmed its other long-delayed enterprise cloud, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, to its original winner, Microsoft. That contract has a $10 billion ceiling.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2020/10/30/pentagon-re-awards-multibillion-dollar-office-tools-contract-to-csra/