The long and twisting road that is the Homeland Security Department’s continuous diagnostics and mitigation (CDM) program got a nice jolt earlier this month. The Government Accountability Office resolved a bid protest that has impacted the implementation of new cyber tools and services.

GAO denied Hewlett-Packard Services’ protest of the $29 million award the General Services Administration made to Knowledge Consulting Group in March to provide DHS headquarters with a variety of continuous monitoring tools. Under the deal, DHS and its components will be the first agency to receive advanced tools, including McAfee’s vulnerability manager and ePolicy Orchestrator tools, ForeScout’s CounterACT’s tool for network access control and Splunk’s big data analytics software.

HP Services protested GSA’s evaluation of its proposal.

But GAO ruled that because HP Services “cannot demonstrate the possibility of a price/technical tradeoff between its quotation and that of KCG, we find that HPES has failed to establish prejudice from the agency action it protests.”

HP Services was upset because it received a technical rating of unacceptable, and believed GSA didn’t evaluate its proposal fairly.

Now that the protest is over, KCG has started its work at DHS, according to one government source.

The source also said the HP protest had no impact on Phase 1 of the CDM task orders that are in pre-award or pre-solicitation phases, in this case Group F.

Emails to HP and KCG, which was bought by ManTech in June, seeking comment on GAO’s decision were not returned.

GAO’s decision bodes well for the CDM program as it ramps up over the next year or so.

This post is part of Jason Miller’s Inside the Reporter’s Notebook feature. Read more from this edition of Jason’s Notebook.

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