WASHINGTON — Eight companies will provide satellite telecom solutions to the Pentagon and other federal agencies under contracts potentially worth $2.6 billion combined over a period of up to five years, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announced Aug. 23.
The companies will provide end-to-end managed network services under the Future Comsatcom Services Acquisition (FCSA) program, which is administered jointly by the GSA and the Defense Information Systems Agency. The indefinite-quantity, indefinite-delivery contracts were awarded under the full and open competition portion of the Custom Satcom Solutions, or CS2, component of the FCSA program.
The companies now eligible to compete for FCSA CS2 work, to be awarded in the form of task orders, are: SES Government Solutions of McLean, Va.; Artel LLC of Reston, Va.; DRS Technical Services of Reston; Hughes Network Systems LLC of Germantown, Md.; Intelsat General Corp. of Bethesda, Md.; Segovia Inc. of Herndon, Va.; TeleCommunication Systems Inc. of Annapolis Md.; and Vizada Inc. of Rockville, Md.
The awards were made following a procurement process that lasted more than two years and was complicated by a bid protest filed May 7 by Harris CapRockof Fairfax, Va. Harris CapRock, which as a longtime provider of satellite solutions to the U.S. Defense Department had been widely viewed as a shoo-in for a FCSA CS2 award, withdrew its protest June 15.
Harris CapRock plans to work with each of the CS2 contract awardees to help meet the needs of the customers, David Cavossa, the company’s president of government solutions, said in a written statement Aug. 13.
FCSA replaces the Defense Satellite Transmission Services-Global program, which has been the Pentagon’s primary vehicle for procuring commercial satellite bandwidth and related services, with annual spending in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The program has three main components: direct purchases of satellite bandwidth, mobile satellite services and CS2.
