Diving into the Chief Information Officer – Solutions and Partners 3 Small Business (CIO-SP3 SB) Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC)
UPDATE: To read our coverage of the new CIO-SP3 SB awards, click here.
Most government contractors focus their efforts on GSA schedules or FedBizOpps solicitations. These common solutions, however, do not cover the entire contracting spectrum – you can find separate, more specialized acquisition vehicles through different agencies. One such specialized federal procurement Executive Agent is NITAAC, which runs the GWAC CIO-SP3 SB.
NITAAC is an Executive Agent established through NIH for the purpose of federal IT procurement. (Courtesy of NIH)
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) as a full-service acquisition program. It is designated as a federal Executive Agent by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to administer GWACS for information technology (IT) acquisitions.
NITAAC currently has three vehicles. If you are a small business, however, you’ll want to focus on CIO-SP3 SB. The Small Business arm of CIO-SP3 is a 10-year Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract valued at $20 billion. Its NAICS code is 541512. The contract’s stated goal is “to provide custom information technology (IT) solutions and services from small businesses across 5 socioeconomic categories.”
CIO-SP3 SB offers defense and civilian agencies services in ten different task areas:
- IT Services for Biomedical Research, Health Sciences, and Healthcare
- Chief Information Officer (CIO) Support
- Imaging
- Outsourcing
- IT Operations and Maintenance
- Integration Services
- Critical Infrastructure Protection and Information Assurance
- Digital Government
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Software Development
UPDATE: To read our coverage of the new CIO-SP3 SB awards, click here.
CIO-SP3 SB awarded its last full round of contracts in 2012, so the next full open season will not be available until 2022. However, they do periodically invite on-ramping as needed. The last solicitation for on-ramping was released in the spring of 2016 — NITAAC’s director Robert Coen explained that due to the success of CIO-SP3, many of the small businesses on the GWAC outgrew their SB status! The awardees for the latest on-ramp should be announced in January. And of course, even when no on-ramping is available, businesses can still search for teaming and subcontracting opportunities.
As you can imagine, with NITAAC, searching for opportunities is easier said than done. The NITAAC online portal, on which contractors may view RFPs and receive task orders under the contract, is closed to the public (you can see the entire e-GOS task order process here). Only contract holders can access detailed information about CIO-SP3 SB.
To see task orders and who the major players in CIO-SP3 SB are, you’ll need a government market intelligence service like EZGovOpps. The EZGovOpps database provides actionable CIO-SP3 SB data, including detailed task order records, lists of prime contract holders and the obligated dollars spent through each company’s contract, and exclusive teaming tools to help your business connect with prime contractors.
To find out more about CIO-SP3 SB, sign up for a free EZGovOpps trial today.
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