General Dynamics protests $2.7B DHS cloud contract award

General Dynamics Information Technology has filed a bid protest with the Government Accountability Office over the award of a $2.7 billion cloud migration services contract to Peraton subsidiary Perspecta.

In its complaint, the federal contracting giant is understood broadly to allege that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) failed to properly consider Perspecta’s performance record and that it unreasonably assessed Perspecta’s proposal.

GDIT also alleges DHS held improper discussions and that there were organizational conflicts of interest the agency should have been aware of prior to making the award.

The contract being contested is for data center and cloud optimization support service and was awarded late last month. It is an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity award, with a 10-year scope, which requires the winner to manage and operate DHS’s move to a hybrid computing environment.

DHS sub-departments can also place orders for service under the contract terms.

Perspecta was previously acquired by Peraton and the transaction closed in May — just three months after the submission bid deadline for the cloud contract in question.

GDIT already provides IT services for DHS, including a $396 million contract awarded in July, to maintain service to the department’s lead data center — Data Center 1—which is located at a NASA facility in Mississippi.

In late 2020, the General Services Administration re-awarded the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract for cloud-based email and collaboration tools across the Department of Defense (DOD) to DGIT-owned CSRA, following a prolonged procurement battle.

Advocates say hybrid cloud computing contracts can be more cost-effective for government agencies, and that they allow faster changes to capacity.

The bid protest comes just months after the Department of Defense in July announced that it would cancel the JEDI defense cloud computing contract. Since then, the Supreme Court has also dismissed a petition by Oracle to keep its separate protest of the JEDI contract award alive.

GDIT and GAO declined to comment on the bid protest.