FAA lifts curtains on multi-billion dollar IT product vehicle

The Federal Aviation Administration is now asking for industry input on its plans to develop a potential 10-year contract vehicle for acquiring commercially available IT products and services.

In a Sam.gov notice posted Friday, the FAA pegged the contract's ceiling value as ranging between $5 billion and $10 billion for technical and professional support work covering the full lifecycle management of IT assets.

Commercial-off-the-shelf products are the FAA's priority for this acquisition, to the point that the agency has this sentence in the request for information:

"The anticipated contracts will NOT (all-caps emphasis theirs) include non-COTS software items and software development for COTS items."

Small businesses are being encouraged to respond to the notice, particularly those with the service-disabled, veteran-owned and 8(a) designations.

Each award will be of a firm-fixed price nature with economic price adjustments, the latter of which has become a key contractual item some companies have sought as a means to better manage increasing costs in the current inflation environment.

The FAA's notice calls out network infrastructure components, personal computing devices, computer peripherals and accessories, audio/visual equipment, software to support the equipment and cloud-based services as areas of interest.

Responses to the request for information are due Jan. 6.