GSA’s McClure describes new cloud RFQ

As Federal News Radio told you on Friday, the General Services Administration released a request for quote (RFQ) in order to put together a contract for infrast...

As Federal News Radio told you on Friday, the General Services Administration released a request for quote (RFQ) in order to put together a contract for infrastructure-as-a-service.

Fed Cloud Blog sat down with GSA’s Associate Administrator
of Citizen Services and Communications, Dave McClure, who talked with members of industry about the RFQ and the new contract at an ACT/IAC event at the end of April.

“I personally feel like we have to make sure we do solid outreach with industry to make sure that our instruments that we’re putting out for cloud services are in line with the way that they think we should be offering them. That was the purpose of the dialogue with industry. We did talk a little bit about the reasons for canceling the prior infrastructure-as-a-service RFQ. I just wanted to emphasize with them that we felt like the market had changed quite a bit since the initial offering, which had started up almost 12 months ago. Vendor engagement, vendor market offerings and vendor understanding of cloud has certainly matured quite a bit in the last 12 months, and the same thing has occurred on the agency side.”

As you probably remember, GSA first issued an RFQ for IaaS in July 2009, but canceled in this past February.

“The infrastructure-as-a-service offering was put out previously [and] was done in very close approximation to the software-as-a-service announcement, and the whole launching of the Apps.gov website. We knew this after the launch, but a valuable lesson that we learned was that there was great confusion in industry about which announcement covered what. There was confusion as to what they needed to reply to to get on schedule for the infrastructure, what they needed to do to get on schedule and get up on the apps.gov storefront for software. We don’t have that problem [now]. The website is up, people understand the processes, so I think we’ve eliminated what was then a very confusing period for just announcing the storefront and announcing an infrastructure BPA all very, very much at the same time.”

This time around, McClure says several things will be different.

“We’re raising the security level to the moderate level. I think that’s where the public sector in general is headed — greater security in these cloud provisioning agreements. So, we’ve raised this up to the moderate level. I think that’s a significant improvement and difference from the prior RFQ. We also are making it much easier and clearer to map the industry offerings to the contract line items in this BPA instrument that we’re using. There was some confusion about whether specific services and prices for some of the industry offerings — how they’ve mapped to the contract line items in this BPA. We’ve gone back and actually cleaned that up and had conversations with industry on how that mapping process can work very effectively. So I think that will also create a much better instrument than what we had before. The third big difference is that things that are awarded off of this instrument will be candidates that will go into the FedRAMP centralized CNA approval process. I think that will make a difference, as well — knowing that your product or service will actually go through one CNA and then be usable across the entire government.”

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