Deals & Deadlines

The General Services Administration has issued requests for information for the Geospatial and IT Infrastructure Lines of Business and set industry days in Washington April 18 and 19.

IT Infrastructure, Geospatial and Budget Formulation are three new lines of business OMB announced when President Bush sent his fiscal 2007 budget request to Congress in February. GSA expects to release a third RFI for Budget Formulation shortly, and has scheduled an industry day for it, also on April 18 in Washington.
Responses to both RFIs are due to GSA by May 5.

GSA and the LOB task forces expect to have a common solution, concept of operations and target architecture finished by June 9, and a business case ready for submission to OMB by August.

For the IT Infrastructure RFI, GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, which acts as the procurement arm for the Office of Management and Budget, is asking vendors for ways to achieve the IT Infrastructure Optimization Initiative goals through common solutions integrated with the Federal Enterprise Architecture.

The LOB will focus on five areas within IT infrastructure:

• Data center—hosting and storage servers, software running on the servers, application development and staff support
  
• Telecommunications—voice networks, cellular services, land line services, wireless devices, voice over IP appliances, computer networking and software to allow voice communications
  
• Data networks—hardware, software, and communications services that let any two computers exchange data
  
• Desktop or seat management—workstations, printers, scanners, software and desktop support personnel
  
• IT help desk—staff to troubleshoot problems users have with desktop or other IT products.
  

In the Geospatial LOB, GSA and OMB are seeking industry input for ways to create across-the-board geospatial data and capabilities, and further refine the opportunities to consolidate investments.

The RFI noted that some potential respondents might only be able to provide information for some geospatial activities but that even limited information could still be valuable.