GSA posts details of telecom pricing

The General Services Administration has published the changes it made in response to public comments to the pricing and services portions of its massive foundation contract under the NS2020 telecommunications strategy.

GSA posted documents on its Interact website that detail updates for the technical and pricing sections of the agency's $50 billion, 15-year Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract draft request for proposal.

GSA has said the Interact website will be a primary contact point for those interested in the upcoming RFP. In some of its latest posts, the agency explained in detail how some of its planned pricing catalogs will work.

GSA officials said the EIS RFP would have a more nimble catalog of services that would allow contractors to quickly add and change offerings to keep up with technology, particularly cloud offerings. At the agency's public meeting in late May, Jim Soltys, a contractor working with GSA on developing the RFP, said the "customer managed" catalogs "will make offerings immediately available to customers." Contractors will be able to continually add items without GSA's involvement, to mirror commercial markets. That flexibility, Soltys said, is particularly important to keep up with rapidly changing technologies such as cloud and managed services. He said GSA would audit the catalogs.

In June 10 InterAct postings, GSA went into more details of how
EIS pricing catalogs would work. It said that under EIS, the agency will have an online pricing capability similar to that available under its Networx and the WITS3 contracts. But the specific design of how the platform will display information is still under consideration.

Potential EIS bidders have also asked the agency whether vendors, GSA or agencies would become authorized catalog users, and whether information loaded into the catalogs would be integrated into GSA's Agency Pricer, or if agencies would have to access individual vendor pricing separately.

In the June 10 posting, GSA said agencies and the public will be able to access the "EIS Pricer" for those Contract Line Item Numbers (CLIN) with pre-negotiated prices for that specific fiscal year -- similar to how the agency's current telecom contract, Networx, operates.  The proposed EIS Catalogs, said the agency, will be maintained by the contractors as contractor-hosted websites, and are subject to change at the discretion of each contractor in accordance with the terms established in their EIS contracts.