GSA makes initial cut of choices for Polaris' woman-owned track
Gettyimages.com / David Talukdar
By
Ross Wilkers
No one has been eliminated from the government-wide IT vehicle, which has a new group of 55 "apparently successful" bidders.
The General Services Administration has made a first round of selections for the woman-owned track of Polaris, a massive government-wide contract vehicle for agencies to buy IT solutions through.
GSA has told 55 woman-owned small businesses they have made the cut as “apparently successful” offerors with evaluations of proposals still ongoing, the agency said in a Monday Sam.gov notice.
In essence, no one has officially been eliminated from the competition yet as GSA continues taking its staggered approach to awarding the 10-year vehicle. With this announcement, GSA is also opening the window to size and status challenge protests that will be referred to the Small Business Administration.
Agencies can use Polaris to acquire emerging technologies and IT solutions from small businesses in areas such as artificial intelligence, automation, immersive technology, distributed ledger technology and edge computing.
Polaris has four tracks of awardees, including a general small business piece and three others for specific socio-economic categories of SBs. The general small business piece remains in protest limbo at the Court of Federal Claims, where that case started almost exactly one year ago.
The service-disabled/veteran-owned track has 23 awardees and the HUBzone portion has 30 winners, both of which were finalized in November. Here again, GSA said this was only the first phase of final selections as other bidders remain eligible for future phases.