NASA announces winners of SEWP V contract

Technology

NASA announces winners of SEWP V contract

NASA has released the awardees of the multi-billion dollar SEWP V contract for two of the four procurement groups.

Federal News Network Staff

March 26, 2015 4:20 pm

2 min read

By Sean McCalley
Federal News Radio

NASA awarded 85 companies a spot on its multi-billion dollar SEWP V procurement contract.

So far, NASA posted winners from two out of the four groups, (Groups A and D), but the other awardees should arrive soon. NASA scheduled the governmentwide acquisition contract to start in May 2015.

The total value of the contract is $20 billion over five years.

SEWP V is a fixed-price, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract that federal agencies can use to procure IT equipment and technology. That ranges from tablets and desktops to cloud services and video conferencing tools. The contract ceiling for this SEWP iteration is almost four times higher than SEWP IV, which had a total value of $5.6 billion.

The two other groups NASA has yet to announce are Group B, which it reserves for Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Businesses, and Group C, which it reserves for other small businesses.

Mark Amtower of Federal Direct tells Federal News Radio he expects Group C to include 80 small business companies. He said as of now, SEWP V is shaping up to have at least three times as many companies included on the GWAC than SEWP IV.

Pre-launch changes

NASA originally announced the winners of SEWP V back in September 2014, but had to delay implementation after the first protest in program history.

Joanne Woytek, the SEWP program manager, said it forced the agency to add extra transition measures onto the back end of the SEWP IV contract, which she classified as successful. SEWP IV now will expire on April 30.

Because SEWP IV brought in record revenue, the program is dropping fees for agencies this month from 0.4 percent to 0.39 percent.

“We’re very fortunate at NASA that decision was made early on when we started the SEWP program to make it independent financially,” said Woytek in January. “We don’t take any money from NASA, so we’re not part of NASA’s budget, and we don’t give anything back to NASA’s budget… if I make too much money, I lower the fees.”

On top of the lower fees, SEWP V will also include new data collection tools and user interfaces for federal agencies and contractors.