This past Friday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) selected awardees for its 10 year, 2-billion-dollar Business Oriented Software Solutions (BOSS) opportunity (solicitation number ACQ-20-0775, originally ACQ-19-1870 to).
The following five companies were chosen for the project:
Booz Allen Hamilton (Contract #1333BJ21D00280001)
8283 Greensboro Drive
McLean, VA 22102
Halvik Corporation (Contract #1333BJ21D00280002)
1600 Spring Hill Road, STE 240
Vienna VA 22182
RIVA Solutions, Inc. (Contract #1333BJ21D00280003)
8000 Westpark Dr. STE 450
McLean, VA 22102
Science Applications International Corporation (Contract #1333BJ21D00280004)
12010 Sunset Hills Rd
Reston, VA, 20190-5856
Steampunk, Inc. (Contract #1333BJ21D00280005)
1753 Pinnacle Drive, STE 900
McLean, VA 22102
USPTO announced the project in August of 2019, and they narrowed the field to 24 candidates in June of last year. Two contractors absent from the list, CGI Federal and Ascendant Services LLC, protested this apparent downselect. GAO refuted this claim, citing a few different points in their defense. Firstly, because USPTO did not ask for pricing information or formal proposals, the RFI was not a solicitation. Secondly, the RFI did not provide any evaluation criteria for the bidder selection process. Lastly, USPTO is exempt from the standard full and open competition requirements. For those reasons, GAO asserted that USPTO was within its rights to select as many (or few) candidates as desired.
The BOSS project (designated NAICS Code 541512) encompasses the following scope of services and outlines the following technical challenges:
Scope of Services:
• Program Management
• System and Software Development
• Architecture and Design
• Coding
• Unit, Integration, Performance, Security, and Regression Testing
• Configuration and Release Management
• Defect Triage
• Production Support
• Maintenance
• User Experience Design
Technical Challenges:
• Build services to be shared and re-used
• Build services that are always available
• Encourage a consistent, user-centered look and feel of web-based IT products
• Provide searchable information
• Write code once and deploy whenever needed
• Take an Agile approach to all IT projects
• Provide mobility and collaboration
The chart below is from a 2016 Software Development and Integration Services solicitation release with an estimated value of $480,000,000.00 over the one (1) year base period and one (1) year option period.
For additional information on the USPTO BOSS contract, please sign into your EZGovOpps account and visit this link, or sign up for a 5-day trial.