Postal Service Picks Vendor to Run Cloud Credential Exchange: This week the U.S. Postal Service announced that it has awarded a 1-year, $2.4 million contract to SecureKey Technologies to develop the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange (FCCX). The contract allows for two additional one-year extensions which could bring the total value of the contract to $15 million. FCCX is an outgrowth of the White House’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). Under the terms of the contract, SecureKey is to develop cloud-based hub that allows users to utilize third-party credentials to securely access multiple federal websites and services. See FCW for more.

NASA Releases SEWP V RFP with China Sourcing Language: It’s been a fairly busy summer for big IT contract watchers, between EAGLE II awards, the OASIS RFP and now SEWP V. This week NASA released the long-awaited formal RFP for its Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V government-wide acquisition contract, expected to be worth at least $20 billion with a base term of 5 years and the potential for 5 option years. SEWP V will replace SEWP IV, which currently boasts 38 contract holders. Overall SEWP vendors provide wide range of advanced technology including tablets, desktops and servers, as well as network equipment, security tools, software products and cloud-based services. In an interesting twist, the RFP includes language extending Sec. 516 of the FY2013 continuing resolution which requires a risk assessment of IT hardware or software manufactured or assembled by “entities that are owned, directed or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China.” This provision would potentially extend that requirement through the life of SEWP (2024 if all option years are exercised) and is something that industry is concerned about and will be watching closely. Responses are due October 14th with questions due September 16th. See more on SEWP V including the full RFP here.

White House Adds Additional Detail to Open Data Policy: Earlier this week, the White House released a supplemental guide to its open data memorandum (OMB Memorandum M-13-13) originally released back in May. The new guide seeks to provide additional clarification to help agencies effectively implement the five main objectives of the earlier memo which include: creating an inventory of enterprise data assets, creating a listing of public data, creating a customer engagement process to help prioritize what data to release, documenting if data cannot be released and clarifying the roles and responsibilities for the effective release of data to the public. Under the memo, agencies have to meet these initial goals by November 1st. See the supplemental guidance here: http://project-open-data.github.io/implementation-guide/ Schneck Appointed to DHS Cyber Post: Former McAfee Vice President and Public Sector CTO, Phyllis Schneck has been appointed as the new Deputy Undersecretary for Cyber Security at DHS, filling a key position that has been without a permanent leader since Mark Weatherford left DHS for the Chertoff Group over a year ago. Schneck is expected to start sometime in September and will have her hands full as DHS is coordinating the implementation of the President’s Cyber Security Executive Order and trying to expand its internal cyber capabilities. See more here from Softpedia.

Government Shutdown Corner: Even though Congress is still out of town for the August recess, there continues to be talk of what will happen when they come back as it relates to funding the government beyond the end of the fiscal year. While no one knows for sure, if recent history is any judge it will come down to the last minute. That said, there’s a lot of speculation as to who wins and who loses if there is a government shutdown. Politico has the latest.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.

Interior Moves Ahead with $10B Cloud Contract: Earlier this week the Court of Federal Claims struck down an argument by Centurylink that the Department of Interior’s solicitation was too vague to ensure fair competition, allowing the $10B cloud services contract to move forward. The contract for cloud services and hosting was originally awarded on May 1st to 10 companies, each eligible for awards of up to $1B over 9 years. Federal Times has a recap.

Senate Appropriations Bill Fully Fund E-Gov and Citizen Services Fund: The Senate Appropriations Committee approved its mark of Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill, which contains language fully funding both the E-Gov Fund and the Citizen Services Fund. The House counterpart legislation, approve earlier this year sought to combine the two funds and reduce the total amount of funding significantly. The Senate bill keeps the funds separate and includes the White House requested level of $20M for the E-Gov Fund and nearly $35M for the Citizen Services Fund. The $20M for the E-Gov Fund is significantly more than last years appropriated level of $12M. Differences between the House and Senate will have to be ironed out as the appropriations process moves forward. Fierce Government IT has more.

GSA Launches IT Solutions Navigator: On August 6th, GSA launched an online tool designed to help agencies determine which IT acquisition vehicles best meet their needs. The tool, called IT Solutions Navigator, is designed to make purchasing IT easier, by providing users with online tools and market research to match their needs to available solutions. See more here.

Government Shutdown Corner: With Congress out of town for the August recess, most of us will have to wait to see how the how the talks progress on a deal to keep the government operating beyond September 30th. Before leaving town, House Speaker John Boehner called on Congress to pass a short term continuing resolution to keep the government open, while continuing to work to pass the remaining individual appropriations bills that the House has not yet passed. Congress returns to work on September 9th and is only in session for 9 legislative days in September. Politico reports on Boehner’s statement.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.

GSA Releases OASIS RFPs: On Wednesday, GSA released requests for proposals for the much-anticipated One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Service (OASIS) multi-award contract, one full and open and the other for small businesses. The IDIQ, which covers seven professional services areas such as management consulting, financial management, engineering and logistics does not have a ceiling value but is expected to be worth upwards of $60 billion over the life of the contract. GSA expects to make somewhere between 20 and 40 awards per functional area under OASIS. Questions are due August 20th and responses are due September 17th. See FBO for more.

White House Releases Details on Management Agenda: The White House released a memo earlier this week, adding additional detail about their plans for what is now being called the “Evidence and Innovation Agenda.” In short, the new initiative directs agencies to develop evidence-based practices that draw on data, analytics and experimentation with the hope of driving agency investment toward policies and programs that work effectively and away from those that don’t. Agencies are expected to incorporate aspects of the Evidence and Innovation Agenda in their 2015 budget requests. Not sure how this will actually work in practice or how human evaluation of program effectiveness will be matched with the data driven analysis, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Here’s the full memo.

Federal News Radio Releases Survey on Effects of Sequestration: Federal News Radio released a survey this week on the effects of sequestration on government contractors and the results are about what you’d expect – many contractors have stopped hiring, furloughed employees, reduced travel and training, and cut back on their marketing budgets. Contractors are also seeing fewer RFPs and greater competition for those that are put out to bid. Over 1,000 vendor personnel responded to the survey conducted in July 2013. See the raw data from the survey and more here.

GSA Considers Adding Plug-In IT to FSSI OS3: GSA is flirting with the idea of adding certain “plug-in” IT products to the next version of the FSSI Office Supply contract. The items being discussed include printers, monitors, keyboards and other hardware. GSA will be soliciting feedback on the idea at its next Industry Day on Aug 6th in New York. GSA has often discussed extending FSSI to include IT but the question has always been: For what IT items does it even make sense and where do you draw the line? Laptops, often thought of as “commodity IT,” could be the next logical place to go, but those as we know can be highly customized depending on different agency and personnel needs. See more here.

Government Shutdown Corner: With football season approaching, as well as the end of the government fiscal year I thought I’d steal a football term to talk about the potential for a government shutdown. There’s more and more talk this week about certain members of Congress planning to shut down the federal government in order to prevent funding for the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare. We will be watching closely and offering our thoughts along the way. Thought for this week is that there are many ways to prevent funding for Obamacare (not that we support or oppose that), or any other program for that matter, without shutting down the entire federal government. Politico has coverage.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.

AT&T Storage as a Service receives FedRAMP approval: AT&T’s Storage as a Service (STaaS) offering is the latest to make its way through the FedRAMP authorization process. This approval marks the sixth conditional authorization granted via FedRAMP for the offering of cloud services to the federal government and it is now available for agencies to leverage. Veris Group, one of the FedRAMP approved third-party assessment organizations acted as the 3PAO. For more see FedRAMP’s website.

GSA Awards Contract for Outsourced 3PAO Approval Process: In other FedRAMP news, GAO has awarded the Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) with the responsibility for reviewing and approving new 3PAOs. The contract is the result of GSA’s RFP earlier this year which sought to outsource the process by which 3PAOs were approved, freeing up GSA resources to focus on other aspects of the FedRAMP process. The program stopped accepting new applications for 3PAOs in the spring, and presumably this award will bring that to an end. At present there are 22 GSA approved 3PAOs and reportedly more than 50 potential cloud service providers in the FedRAMP approval pipeline. FCW has a story.

Cloud Spending Could Reach $7.7 billion by 2017: IDC Government Insights has a new report out saying that government spending on cloud computing could reach $7.7 billion by 2017, more than four times what is expected in 2014. This is good news for cloud computing contractors who have watched closely as government technology spending has leveled off significantly in recent years. See the full report here.

Army Awards ITES-2 to Six Firms: On July 19th the Army announced that it had awarded a $500 million IDIQ contract for hardware, software and related services to six companies – Dell Federal Systems, IBM, Unicom Government, CDW-G, Iron Bow Technologies and World Wide Technology – under the product portion of the Information Technology Enterprise Solution-2 (ITES-2) contract. These companies will now compete for task orders under the multi award contract. This award replaces the original ITES which was responsible for $4.6 billion in task orders over its lifetime. FCW has a brief recap.

Shutdown Talk Begins on Capitol Hill: With a little more than two months to go before the beginning of the new fiscal year and not a single appropriations bill signed into law, talk of a government shutdown has begun on Capitol Hill. This year, the talk seems to be centering around the fight over funding of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) with some members of the Senate believing that one way to prevent any funds from going to implement the health care program would be to hold up funding for the continuing resolution which is likely to be needed to keep the government open beyond the end of this fiscal year. I am sure we will hear more about this as we get closer to the September 30th deadline. For now, see what David Hawkings at Roll Call has to say about it.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.

VA terminates $36M cloud deal: The Department of Veterans Affairs decided this week to terminate a $36 million cloud email deal with HP, citing material changes in the agency’s requirements. The original plan was to move some 600,000 VA employees to Microsoft’s government community cloud for email and calendar services. Although the contract was signed in November, 2012 no actual users – only test users – made it into the cloud despite the agency having the capability to do it. VA declined to provide any specifics as to what the requirements changes were and didn’t give any indication of what the next steps will be. According to this FCW report the now terminated deal cost VA about $150,000 plus whatever the termination settlement costs are. Stay tuned.

E-Gov Fund continues to face funding pressure: The Electronic Government Find seems to be under attack just about every year as appropriators look either to cut funding, merge it with other like-minded government entities or some combination of the two. This year the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government has proposed merging the E-Gov Fund with the Citizen Services Fund to create an Information and Engagement Fund and has proposed a total of approximately $40 million for the combined effort, nearly $15 million below the Obama Administration’s request and $6.5 million below last year’s enacted level (if funded separately). Expect continued discussion about this proposal as the bill moves through the process. Last year, where a similar proposal was made, good government groups and others stepped up lobbying efforts and were successful in having the two funds appropriated separately. Federal News Radio has a good recap.

Lawmakers introduce legislation calling for a Government Transformation Commission: Lawmakers in both the House and Senate introduced legislation this week calling for the establishment of a seven-member Government Transformation Commission to make recommendations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of federal programs. Of the seven members, each appointed to three-year terms, four would be appointed by Congress and three be the President, with two of the President’s nominees serving as Co-Chairs. The House bill (HR 2675) was introduced by Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois and the Senate bill (S. 1297) by Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois. No word yet on whether or not the committees of jurisdiction have plans to move the bills through the legislative process. See the House bill here.

Deltek acquires Acumen: In industry news, Deltek announced this week that it has acquired Acumen, a leading innovative provider of project management solutions and services for project-oriented businesses. According to the press release, the addition of Acumen will allow Deltek to offer the “the world’s deepest project management for companies across a wide variety of verticals.” See the full release here.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.