Mary-Louise Hoffman
Industry and government executives have offered a range of opinions on a $22 billion information technology acquisition vehicle run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Federal Times reported Thursday.
Christy O’Farrell writes the Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions II program appears to be gaining momentum almost four years after the agency issued the request for proposals.
Dan Clever, DHS’ deputy chief procurement officer, expects to see an increase in EAGLE II activity as more functional service categories become available to vendors.
Vendors will compete for task orders to provide systems, software and related IT support across the department through the contract vehicle.
“There weren’t a ton of opportunities in the first year, but it seems to be increasing,” Brian Baker, teaming coordinator for The Ambit Group, told Federal Times.
“The program’s success hinges on how effectively they can get out of the gates,” Baker added, according to the publication.
O’Farrell reports that some contractors observed that business remains slow even almost two years after the awarding of the first EAGLE II orders.
“We are hoping that more components of DHS use it,” Kim Nguyen, chief business development officer at Pragmatics, told the publication.
“I think that there’s a lot of funding that’s going on; it’s just not going through this vehicle,” he added, according to O’Farrell’s article.
Both Baker and Nguyen believe that DHS’s EAGLE program office need to address processing and ease-of-use issues to attract more customers.
