Five agencies have now issued task orders worth up to $68 million under the General Services Administration's OASIS small business contract, according to contracting data.
The Air Force, Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture departments have all issued task orders under the contract.
The task orders are for services such as improving veteran telephone access at the VA and providing acquisition and contract life-cycle management support, according to data from the Federal Procurement Database System.
OASIS and OASIS Small Business are governmentwide contracts that offer professional services, such as financial management and engineering, scientific and logistics services that agencies can tap to augment their own staffs.
The contract is divided into two portions: one for small businesses and one for companies of any size. The small-business portion of
OASIS has 123 small businesses divided into eight different groups depending on their overall size and annual revenue.
The Air Force also has two task orders currently in the source-selection process and another three that are requesting proposals for, according to the Air Force. By the end of December the Air Force expects to have awarded a total of six task orders under the OASIS small-business contract.
Jim Ghiloni, the OASIS program officer at GSA, said in an interview with Federal Times Oct. 3 the number of task orders on the contract will only continue to grow in fiscal 2015.
"There's a great deal of interest here right out of the gate. We are excited about that, and we expect it will just continue to grow," said Ghiloni.
Eventually small businesses on the contract may even grow large enough to be moved on to the unrestricted portion of the contract and then replaced by more small businesses, Ghiloni said.
"We think there's going to be extensive opportunities for small businesses on OASIS SB. And that hopefully they'll very rapidly outgrow small. So we fully expect that at the five-year point we'll be able to transition those companies from the small-business contract to the full and open one through an on-ramp process," he said.
The task orders include:
- An SEC award with a $57 million ceiling value for support services to Amyx Inc.
- An Agriculture award with a $3.8 million ceiling value for acquisition support to Panum Telecom LLC.
- A VA award with a $1.2 million ceiling value for program implementation support to IKUN LLC.
Satya Akula, president and CEO of Amyx, Inc., said he has been involved in federal contracting processes for 20 years and the OASIS small-business contract was one of the fastest he had ever seen.
"As a small business in the lowest price technically acceptable environment, we can't afford a lengthy capture, proposal and award cycle," Akula said. "The GSA OASIS team did an admirable job awarding this OASIS contract expeditiously and also put in the foundational processes that help federal agencies procure services the fastest way."
He said he was surprised by how quickly agencies began issuing task orders under the contract, and he expects that activity to only increase as the contract matures.
Jennifer Sakole, the principal analyst for Federal Information Solutions at Deltek, also said the contract will become more popular as agencies begin to use it. That helps build up more data and information about the contract so other agencies can see how it performs and how its used. "It's going to take some time to build a customer base," Sakole said.
She said the OASIS contract will probably follow the same trajectory as other governmentwide contracts: a gradual buildup and then a peak usage period followed by a slow decline. That's usually when agencies award follow-up contracts, she said. "There's no reason not to anticipate that same type of cycle," she said.
