DISA Awards 23 Small Businesses Spots on $7.5B IT Innovation Contract

The Defense Department’s IT shop announced a pool of small business awards on its $7.5 billion Science, Engineering, Technology and Innovation, or SETI, contract, completing the process more than a year after initial awards were made.

The Defense Information Systems Agency announced Monday that 23 small businesses will join the SETI contract, created to help the military research, build and deploy the next generation of defense IT.

The SETI contract “is designed for current and future mission requirements, next-generation technological advancements and disruptive innovation that looks to create paradigm shifts in the ways warfighters interact with DOD's information technology,” according to an announcement from DISA last year on the initial awards.

DISA awarded 14 spots to large businesses through the unrestricted pool in June 2018. Those awards were subsequently protested through the Government Accountability Office, leading to another large business, Solers, being added to the contract in February. Three additional protests were partially sustained by GAO but did not lead to additional awards.

Awards for the restricted pool were expected earlier this year. However, additional protests in the Court of Federal Claims slowed this process, pushing the awards into the third fiscal quarter, according to DISA contracting officers.

Those protests are still ongoing, and there’s no official timeline on when a decision will be made. A DISA spokesperson told Nextgov the agency is expecting a decision before the end of fiscal 2019, though that could change.

The 23 small businesses added through the restricted pool include:

• Affinity Innovations
• Applied Systems Engineering Joint Venture
• A Square Group
• Business Computers Management Consulting Group
• Bluestone Logic
• Credence Management Solutions
• DHPC Technologies
• InCadence Strategic Solutions Corporation
• INNOPLEX
• Innovation Evolution Technologies JV
• Innovative Government Solutions JV
• Integrated Systems
• Interactive Process Technology
• Mission Support LP
• NetCentric Technologies
• Riverside Engineering
• Semper AASKI Alliance
• Superlative Technologies
• Synergy Business Innovation & Solutions
• TekSynap Corporation (Formerly Synaptek)
• Tiber Creek Consulting
• ValidaTek
• Volant Associates