The General Services Administration has begun work on the second iteration of the CIO Modernization and Enterprise Transformation contract vehicle for information technology services and expects the COMET recompete to have a ceiling value of more than $1 billion, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.
About 400 companies participated in an industry day held by GSA for COMET 2 in September.
David Shive, chief information officer at GSA, stated during the event that the follow-on contract will leverage the lessons learned in the past years and will be larger in scope.
“We’re looking for partners who understand the basic principles of zero trust, especially at the application layer, where a lot of this work in the next generation of COMET is going to be prevalent,” Shive said at the industry day.
“Same thing at the data layer, knowing that the applications we build are going to have to know everything and anything about data and who’s using it so that we can apply our zero trust principles to that is going to be critically important. Same thing for customer experience,” he added.
In 2019, GSA awarded 12 companies spots on the first iteration of the COMET contract, which replaced the CIO Application Maintenance, Enhancements and Operations vehicle.
In December 2021, GSA added eight vendors to the contract vehicle to support its digital transformation efforts.
With the next iteration of COMET, Shive noted that requirements will reflect the agency’s maturity when it comes to moving systems to the cloud.
“We’ll be smart about how we move to the cloud. Do we consider a managed service, which is another offering thing we consider? We’re looking for partners who have that broad mindset, that cloud smart mindset, with helping us do our work,” the CIO said.
