SBA inks EIS contract

The Small Business Administration signed a $130 million ceiling contract for next-generation telecommunications services under the General Services Administration's Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions vehicle in late September.

The agency's contract was awarded to AT&T on Sept. 27 and will run through 2032, according to contracting documents.

The SBA signed its contract at the same time as two other large agencies, the Social Security Administration and the IRS, signed EIS contracts worth a combined ceiling value of just over $1 billion.

The GSA had set Sept. 30 as a deadline for agencies to issue their EIS task orders. The date was one of three that the agency reset late in 2018 after extending is original 2020 deadline for agency transition to EIS to 2023. The reset came after federal agencies were slow to issue initial solicitations for the contract.

The latest GSA report on EIS ATO status issued Oct. 9 shows the remaining four of the nine EIS vendors have completed over 90% of their back-office system testing: Coretech, Granite, MetTel and Microtech, have all completed 92.2% of the testing, according to the GSA notice. Five of the largest vendors have their authorities to operate.

Recently departed Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Alan Thomas told FCW earlier this month that he expected two of those remaining four vendors would likely get ATOs by Thanksgiving, with the remaining two by the end of the calendar year.

Correction: Due to an editing error, this article omitted the name of a vendor. It was updated Oct. 21 to reflect that AT&T won the Small Business Administration's telecom task order.