Though some agencies will not meet the General Services Administration’s Sept. 30 deadline to award task orders for the massive Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions telecommunications contract, they’re making progress and GSA does not anticipate extending any of the other related deadlines, Director of GSA’s Office of Telecommunication Services Allen Hill said Wednesday.
“I’ll say this—it is extremely important to be deliberate in the beginning. There’s a lot of mission needs that agencies have and they are complex,” Hill said at an event hosted by ACT-IAC in Washington. “And it’s easy for an outsider to look at things and say, ‘Why isn't it going faster?’ But we have a responsibility to the American public to not only modernize but to not break our services that we provide to the public.”
GSA rolled out the $50 billion next-generation contract vehicle for network and telecom services in 2017 to promote modernization and support governmentwide procurement of everything from phone and internet lines, to voice over IP and other emerging technologies. Nine vendors were deemed capable of doing the work, but so far only three have received the required security certifications to begin the real business. And while the contract is meant to replace other large contract vehicles, including Networx and WITS-3, the transition has been challenging.
The most recent report from GSA revealed that as of late June, only 23 out of an expected 127 solic ..
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