Vendors roll with GSA changes
Vendors say they are OK with some of GSA's moves to acquisition interfaces and contract consolidation.
Several IT vendors said they're not worried about Tuesday, when the sun sets on the General Services Administration's creaky FedBizOpps website, or about the agency's efforts to consolidate contracts.
"It's a little bit of a change in how we're going to track" federal contracts, Dolly Oberoi, CEO of C2 Technologies, said of the GSA's shuttering of its old FBO.gov site next week.
FedBizOpps won't be available come Nov. 12, as GSA merges that website with nine others onto its beta.SAM.gov site. The new site, according to GSA, supports two distinct types of federal awards: acquisition and federal assistance.
The beta.SAM site merges the GSA's System for Award Management, the Federal Procurement Data System, federal domestic assistance grants catalog, past performance databases, federal and contract performance systems (Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System and Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System) and others.
FedBizOpps data, which has for decades contained federal agency acquisition proposals, will be listed under "Contract Opportunities" on the beta.SAM.gov site come the morning of Nov. 12.
"All these opportunities are advertised in multiple ways," Oberoi said in remarks at a Washington Technology breakfast on the market outlook for 2020.
"We use business intelligence tools, like GovWin and others. You can't rely on one source anyway," she said. "If you can have a way to get the data in multiple ways, it works better."
GSA is also in the process of consolidating its dozens of buying schedules into a single schedule, as well as helping agencies eliminate their redundant internal contracts in favor of one of GSA's vehicles.
Those kinds of changes don't have a marked impact on most contractors, agreed CGI Federal President Tim Hurlebaus and Scott McIntyre, CEO of the technology and management consultancy Guidehouse.
Whether a contract is cut by an agency or through GSA, "it doesn't really matter," said Hurlebaus.
"I feel the same. We have a lot of vehicles" the company works with, said McIntyre.
"It's a lot like a football team. You have an adaptable game plan," Hurlebaus said.