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.

Obama Announces New Management Agenda: On July 8th President Obama announced plans to focus attention on a new management agenda aimed at leveraging innovation and technology to improve government services. The announcement was short on details, but it is expected the Sylvia Burwell, the new OMB Director who is heading this up will begin to formulate ideas in the near future. In the announcement Obama pointed to the effort to consolidate data centers and the open government initiative as examples of innovations from his first term. He also pointed to the development of Healthcare.gov, MyUSA and the new batch of Presidential Innovation Fellows as some of what we can expect to see going forward. More to come and FCW has a story.

DISA to Open Cloud Competition in August: DISA is currently soliciting industry feedback on a draft request for proposals published on June 24th for what is expected to be a $450 million cloud computing project. According to comments from DISA they released the draft RFP to spark a discussion with industry about how to make cloud services available throughout the Department of Defense. The agency will hold a pre-solicitation conference on July 12th and expects to issue the formal RFP on August 26th. Federal Times has more.

GSA’s FedRAMP Seeks to Update Baseline Controls: While we were away, FedRAMP announced a renewed effort to update the baseline security controls associated with the cloud security authorization program, to ensure that the controls are in line with the recently updated NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 4, Security and Privacy Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations. As part of this process they are soliciting public comments via a survey which can be found here.

Interior Takes Records Management to the Cloud: The Department of Interior is the first cabinet level agency to officially take records management to the cloud through the Email, Enterprise Records and Document Management System (eERDMS). The effort is part of Interior’s IT Transformation Initiative which is expected to save $500 million by 2020. IQ Business Group manages the cloud that will store the agency’s records and documents. FCW covers it 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.

Oracle and Salesforce to integrate clouds: Oracle and Salesforce announced on June 25 that they have signed a comprehensive nine-year partnership to integrate clouds. The deal encompasses all three tiers of cloud computing — Applications, Platform and Infrastructure. Under the agreement Salesforce will standardize on the Oracle Linux operating system, the Oracle Database, and Java Middleware Platform and Oracle plans to integrate Salesforce.com with Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud. The move is the latest in a series of big announcements by Oracle including their recent announcement that they would be moving from NASDAQ to the NYSE. Read more here.

Senate seeks changes to DOD OCIO: According to a report in Fierce Government IT, the Senate Armed Services Committee has proposed rolling the duties on the DOD CIO into the portfolio of the Department’s Chief Management Officer and then elevating the CMO to the level of Undersecretary of Defense. In the report accompanying S. 1197, the committee states that it believes this move will strengthen the office of CIO.

GAO out with report on GPRA Modernization Act: GAO released a report this week highlighting the progress made and challenges that remain for the federal government as it tries to integrate performance management into its culture. While GAO sees some progress in developing and implementing agency performance goals and cross-agency priority goals, they believe the executive branch needs to do more to fully implement and leverage the act’s provisions to address governance challenges. See the full report.

GSA grants federal agency FedRAMP approval: GSA announced this week that the National Information Technology Center (NITC) at USDA has received authority to operate from GSA for its Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS) offering. This approval, the second agency CSP approval and the first for a federal agency CSP, will now be placed in the FedRAMP repository available for agencies to leverage. According to the release, USDA’s NITC worked with 3PAO COACT and internal USDA audit teams to complete the FedRAMP requirements to achieve an agency ATO. This authorization used the FedRAMP baseline controls, the FedRAMP templates, and was granted an ATO by the USDA Associate CIO. For more on FedRAMP, click here.

NASA taps Johnson Space Center CIO for headquarters job: NASA announced this week that Larry Sweet, who has been at Houston’s Johnson Space Center for 26 years will be replacing former NASA CIO, Linda Cureton who left the agency earlier this year. Federal News Radio has the story.

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.

House passes Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) in Defense Authorization: On Friday, the US House of Representatives passed an amendment to the FY 2014 Defense Authorization bill, adding Rep. Issa’s (R-CA) federal IT reform legislation to the bill. The revised version of the bill increases the authority of agency CIOs, promotes increased training of the IT acquisition workforce and expands efforts to optimize the data center infrastructure. The bill now moves to the Senate, where the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has jurisdiction over federal IT but the issue will have to be address jointly by HSGAC and the Senate Armed Services Committee since the language is now part of the must-pass Defense bill. See SIIA’s full statement here.

Dell launches government cloud: Last week, IT and services company Dell launched Dell Cloud for the U.S. Government, a targeted effort offering federal agencies on premise, dedicated and private clouds as well as multi-tenant options. The cloud environment was designed specifically to comply with FedRAMP and NIST 800-53 and the company plans to submit its solution to the FedRAMP certification process in the near future. Read more from GCN.

GSA upholds IBM protest of Amazon, CIA cloud deal: Earlier this year, the CIA picked Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a private cloud for the CIA, NSA and the rest of the intelligence community to help them better analyze data and other information. The award, worth approximately $600 million over 5 years was protested by IBM and upheld in part by GSA on June 6th. In upholding the IBM protest, GSA pointed to comparability of the CIA’s evaluation of prices and that the CIA materially relaxed a solicitation term in post-award negotiations. IBM’s bid of about $94 million a year was $54 million less than AWS’s $148 million annually but the source selection authority felt the price difference was offset by AWS’s technical capability. It is unclear at this stage how this process will go forward. FCW has an inside look.

DHS to host webinar on the next generation IT: On June 26, 2013, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate will host a webinar designed to bring private industry up-to-date on the future IT needs of TSA, including what kinds of cutting-edge IT, intelligence, electronic explosives detection and other security equipment DHS is going to need to safeguard aircraft and airports in the future. Webinar attendees should register by June 19th. Interested parties can register and see the FedBizOpps notice 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.