Md. firm wins $111 million FDA job

Food and Drug Administration

Food and Drug Administration officials awarded a five-year, $111 million contract to a small information technology consulting firm in Gaithersburg, Md., to help the agency consolidate its technology infrastructure services.

ITSolutions LLC, which started three years ago and has about 200 employees, will provide desktop computer support services, network administration, network engineering and architecture, and telecommunication services to the FDA, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

"The primary thrust of the contract is to consolidate IT infrastructure services," said Mike Dietz, vice president of operations and delivery for ITSolutions. "All their infrastructure is completely distributed and stovepiped, and the intent of this contract is to centralize all of the infrastructure resulting in, obviously, cost savings."

He said the base contract is worth $111 million, but there is also an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity task order component to the contract for additional IT services that can be awarded to the company as required by the agency.

The competitively bid contract previously had been awarded to primarily large companies, Dietz said, but this one came out as a small business set aside. The contract was awarded Aug. 18 and work will start Oct. 1. He said ITSolutions is the prime contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., which previously held the FDA contract, Unisys Corp. and Apptis Inc. — formerly known as PlanetGov Inc. — as subcontractors.

"We're just ecstatic," Dietz said, who said he and a business partner quit their jobs because they always wanted to start a company of their own. "We worked on this for 18 months. The competition was incredibly enormous and everybody was going after it really, really hard. We were obviously thrilled to come out on top."

Among its federal clients, ITSolutions has previously worked with the FDA and the Internal Revenue Service for network engineering and architecture, project management services and business case analysis, he said.