1. The Statewide Technology Procurement Division released an intent to award on March 10 to Bond Building LLC for the construction of eight communications vaults that will house radio equipment used and operated by the California Highway Patrol. CHP has approximately 325 radio sites throughout the state.
2. The California Department of Technology on March 9 issued an intent to award to Arrow Wire & Cable Inc., which will provide pricing options for materials supporting all "layer one" infrastructure (i.e., facilities, Windows servers, Unix and mainframe) aspects of data, voice, and video cabling in the state data center.
3. The California Department of Technology also issued an intent to award to ePlus Technology Inc. for a data center distribution router upgrade.
4. Requests for Offers are due March 24 a Department of Technology bid related to work on the development of a California Statewide Strategic Plan.
5. Finals bids are due April 24 for the County Expense Claim Reporting Information System (CECRIS), a $10.6 million IT modernization project that was originally approved in 2007, but was put on hold in 2014 to allow the Department of Social Services to re-evaluate the project. The new system will replace two existing legacy systems: the County Expense Claim (CEC) and County Assistance Claim (CA 800) systems. The state accepted draft bids this month. The CEC system, built atop solutions released in 1997, processes about $8 billion in claims for county welfare departments.
6. The Department of General Services invites proposals from firms qualified to provide platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services that have achieved FedRAMP High authorization to the state of California and participating local governmental agencies at contracted pricing. The solicitation includes PaaS and IaaS Cloud Services categories within three silos defined as services offered by Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and ARC-P Cloud and their resellers. Primary technical and administrative proposals are due March 22. Cost proposals will follow.
7. The state is expanding the pool of vendors pre-qualified to provide state agencies and departments with "user-centric" design and agile software development services — which will be eligible to bid on future Requests for Offers (RFOs) — from 11 companies to as many as 30. As part of the process, ownership of the pool is moving from the California Health and Human Services Agency (CHHS) to the California Department of Technology, in order to allow a broader range of state agencies and departments to use the qualified developers' services. Those vendors that qualified could be announced as soon as March 22.
8. This Friday, March 17, is the due date for vendors to submit proposals as DGS refreshes the state's Master Services Agreement for IT consulting. The award could be announced in April. DGS is expanding the number of eligible job classifications to 25 (previously there have been just seven), allowing vendors to adjust their pricing based on California's Consumer Price Index in some circumstances, and allowing purchase orders completed before the end of the MSA term contract to continue as needed beyond the MSA expiration date, among other changes. More than 165 contractors are currently qualified to provide services under the MSA for IT consulting services. It most recently was put out to bid in 2013. The existing IT Consulting Services MSA is scheduled to expire in March 2018 for a majority of contractors; some contracts, though, will be over in 2017.
