The Schedule 70 Family Continues to Expand: EOS SIN

Over the past few years, GSA’s IT Schedule 70 has loosened its belt to make room for additional Special Item Numbers (SIN). Included in this list are SINS surrounding cloud, health IT and cybersecurity. More recently, the agency announced consideration for the Earth Observation Solutions (EOS) SIN #132-41 to accommodate a growing industry.

First, here is a look at the other SINs that have been added to Schedule 70 over past three years:

• Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) SIN (#132-xx) – recently introduced by GSA to replace the tools portion of the CDM Tools/CMaaS BPA that is set to expire in August 2018. The SIN is expected to be instituted in the early summer time frame.
• Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services (HACS) SIN (#132-45A, #132-45B, #132-45C, #132-45D) – made available in October 2016 for the purchase of cybersecurity services with a suite of offerings that includes: penetration testing, incident response, cyber hunt, and risk and vulnerability assessment (RVA).
• Health IT SIN (#132-56) – created in June 2016 for the specific purpose of separating Health IT from other IT related services. Includes a wide range of services such as connected health, electronic health records, health information exchanges, health analytics, personal health information management and innovative Health IT solutions.
• Cloud SIN (#132-40) – implemented in April 2015 for government purchases of commercial cloud technology services. It contains the following sub-categories: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and E-mail as a Service (EaaS).

GSA describes the purpose of the EOS SIN as providing a “one-stop-shop as new commercial imagery providers, capabilities, and data solutions emerge in the Information Technology market to meet the needs of Federal, State, Local, Regional, and Tribal governments.“

Included in its scope, the SIN aims to offer a variety of earth observation services, products and services across the satellite imagery and communication, distribution and content management and data and analytics fields. According to the RFI released to vendors, these may include but are not limited to “ground, satellite and aerial based sensor data and imagery; worldwide digital transmission, internet, data, and video services and products through various networks, platforms, and applications.” The SIN will be utilized for work in disaster response, defense, mapping, meteorology, agriculture and other such missions.

To this end, GSA has described the growing need for the EOS SIN due to a growth in the earth observation industry as well as an increased establishment of companies, satellites and commercial technologies in this field. GSA did not announce an estimated size and range for this niche market.

In order to grab a small glimpse of the geospatial/space market, the following chart displays data from FPDS of a sample NAICS Code likely to be covered under the SIN, Satellite Telecommunications (517410). The following agencies spent the most dollars under this NAICS between FY 2014 and FY 2016:

Other agencies such as the USSOCOM, FAA, NOAA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) followed closely behind the above spending figures.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the EOS SIN will streamline the purchases within the space and earth observation technology market. For now, GSA anticipates the following timeline of events for this latest Schedule 70 relative:

• 2/14/2017 - Request For Information (RFI) published
• 3/6/2017 - Held an industry day in Washington, D.C.
• 4/28/2017 - Draft significant changes posted on GSA Interact
• 5/18/2017 - IT Schedule 70 Webinar on EOS SIN
• Early June - EOS SIN established for vendors to add to contract