Peraton keeps up fight for $5.7B Air Force enterprise IT contract

Peraton’s battle to wrestle away a $5.7 billion Air Force IT contract is entering the final stages as company has made a fourth filing objecting to the service branch's selection of CACI International.

The additional protest filings have been in response to submissions by the Air Force as part of the bid protest process. Each filing prompted Peraton to raise new challenges to the CACI award.

The Government Accountability Office remains on track to render a decision by April 13, a date set after Peraton filed its protest in January.

CACI first captured the enterprise IT-as-a-service contract in August. Peraton, Accenture and Science Applications International Corp. all filed protests afterward. The Air Force then took a corrective action to consider the issues those companies raised involving the evaluation and their allegations that CACI had an organizational conflict-of-interest.

The Air Force again picked CACI in January and that sparked the current protest by Peraton. Accenture also protested the second award, but later withdrew. SAIC never filed a protest against CACI’s second win.

Peraton's complaints have not changed that much from its first protest in August to the second in January. The company continues to claim the evaluation of proposals was flowed and CACI has an organizational conflict-of-interest because it hired former Air Force employees to work on the proposal.

In its second set of protests, Peraton is arguing that the Air Force didn’t follow through on its corrective action and would have won the contract if it had.

The Air Force enterprise-IT-as-a-service contract would be a big win for either Peraton or CACI. In fact, CACI can claim it as the biggest win in its history if GAO denies the protest.

The contract is a blanket purchase agreement known as Wave 1. Whomever wins will take over responsibility for IT service desk support and manage a catalog of offerings for 700,000 users around the world.