CACI
EAGLE II Overview

Overview

The original EAGLE suite of contracts was awarded to 25 large businesses (in June 2006) and 28 small businesses (in September 2006) across five (5) functional categories with a five year base period and two (2) one (1) year options. Under this arrangement, individual task order competition can be limited to small businesses within a selected functional category if there are two or more small businesses that can provide the required services.

As required per the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), contractors are required to re-represent their size status for long-term contracts, those contracts in excess of 5 years, if a merger or acquisition occurs, or if there are contracts with novation agreements. The purpose of the re-representation rule is to improve the accuracy of small business size status reporting. This rule was added to all of the EAGLE contracts. Nine (9) of the original 28 EAGLE small businesses have since been acquired by larger firms; thus, they no longer have small business status but can compete for task orders which are not set-aside for small businesses. DHS expects that a majority of the existing EAGLE small businesses will not qualify as ‘small’ at the end of year 5 of the contract. With 19 small businesses remaining in the EAGLE suite of contracts and 2 ½ years of contract performance remaining, DHS does not plan to “ramp-up” (add contractors to the EAGLE suite of contracts). Instead, the plan is to consider proceeding with EAGLE II – Small Business.

Background:

The existing EAGLE contract serves as a department-wide platform for acquiring Information Technology (IT) service solutions in five functional categories (FC's):

• FC1 – Engineering Design, Development, Implementation and Integration
• FC2 – Operations and Maintenance (2 tiers; 1 without telecommunications and 1 with telecommunications)
• FC3 – Independent Test, Evaluation, Validation and Verification
• FC4 – Software Development
• FC5 – Management Support Services

In reviewing the EAGLE task orders awarded to date, DHS has observed that FC3 has rarely been used and FC5 is best leveraged when included as part of each EAGLE task order requirement. In addition, preliminary small business market research has indicated that the small business IT community is capable of providing services involved in categories FC1, FC2, and FC4. Further, DHS has noted that an increasing number of small businesses are capable of providing IT services that have a substantial telecommunications element - currently FC2 – Tier 2.

Strategy:

Accordingly, DHS has developed two one page charts summarizing alternative approaches (please see Attachment A – Alternative Strategy Using Small Business Category Tracks and Attachment B – Alternative Strategy Using Functional Category Tracks). Alternative 1 utilizes a small business category approach where task orders would be competed within separate pools for 8(a) small businesses, HUBZone small businesses, Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned small businesses, small businesses, and IT/Telecommunications small businesses. Alternative 2, utilizes a functional category approach where award pools would be established using functional areas of work. The scope of each contract would be limited to that functional category and market research would determine which small business category would be the targeted pool.

EAGLE II – Small Business will continue to be a suite of Indefinite-Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity services-based contracts that will enable all DHS components to acquire IT support services to accomplish their mission objectives. DHS believes that either of the proposed approaches provides outstanding opportunities for the small business community, while enabling DHS to benefit from a highly capable small business IT talent pool. Additionally, both approaches support our ongoing commitment of identifying opportunities for the various federal small business programs.

Requirement:

The DHS Office of Procurement Operations (OPO), invites interested vendors to respond to this notice by providing comments on the attached draft “EAGLE II – Small Business” proposed plans for the follow-on effort for the EAGLE contract (see Attachments A and B). It is important to note that vendor responses are solely for the purpose of requesting industry feedback and neither constitute pre-competition, nor will responses be evaluated in any way. These draft plans should not be construed in any way as the official EAGLE II – Small Business plans, nor do they commit DHS to a particular course of action or a particular timeline. This is a market research effort to gain insight into the capacity of the small business community to meet continuing DHS IT requirements.