The US Air Force has put out a request for proposals (RFP) for 'phase 2' of its enterprise IT service delivery.
The contract is a potential 10-year deal with a $12.5 billion budget and will work towards the Air Force's goals to centralize its many IT modernization efforts. Responses are due by April 22.
The RFP is extended to large and small businesses and looks to “modernize, operate and maintain the network infrastructure on all Department of the Air Force locations, to include Guard and Reserve bases.” At least five contracts are planned to be awarded to eight firms, and a minimum of three contracts to HUBZone companies, women-owned small businesses, and service-disabled veteran-owned small business firms.
Each task order included in the RFP will require the contractor to support "the rapid transformation of the DAF’s base-centric IT to an enterprise approach leveraging industry best practices," and will "enable the DAF’s prevalence over all adversaries through the employment of cutting-edge data techniques, technology, and infrastructure."
William Beauchamp, deputy chief information officer at the Air Force told Federal News Network that the plan is to award the contacts later this sprint and the first set of task orders to go out by the end of the fiscal year.
The contract is part of the Air Force's key centralization strategy.
"They started by essentially absorbing the bases that were part of our risk reduction experiment originally, that preceded the acquisition, and they are right now delivering common central services that will be applicable to all bases,” Beauchamp told FNN.
Across the 185 Air Force and Space Force bases, there are currently around 1,000 data centers running. According to Beachamp, the Air Force is looking to move applications to the cloud where it is appropriate.
"We fully expect that more and more applications will be moving into our cloud architecture. That’s called CloudOne today, and that contract is up for renewal. It will be re-competed, and it will be calling it CloudOne Next, but the intent is that it will be just the next evolution of the CloudOne program,” he said to FNN.
The Air Force is additionally planning to release three solicitations for its CloudOne Next in Q3 2024. The blanket purchase agreements will cover cloud service provider reseller and software management, architecture and common shared services, and enterprise application modernization and migration.
Prior to the Wave 2 RPF, the Air Force awarded Consolidated Analysis Center Inc. a $5.7bn contract to outsource the day-to-day management of its IT infrastructure in April 2023.
In January 2024, ViaSat was awarded a $900m contract by the US Air Force to "transition and integrate new technologies." As part of that contract, ViaSat will prototype and test systems, hardware, software, and cybersecurity solutions for the USAF. The contract has an approximate five-year term, with options for up to an additional five years.
