State Contract Outlook: Amid Many Renewals, Plenty of New Opportunity

Top representatives from state IT governance convened online Thursday and delivered a wealth of relevant announcements and updates for vendors doing business with the state as well as those companies that aspire to do so.

The key points from the two-hour virtual presentation were delivered by executives from the California Department of Technology (CDT) and the Department of General Services (DGS), the state’s business manager.

DGS’ Deputy Director Angela Shell, who heads the department’s Procurement Division (PD) and serves as the state’s chief procurement officer, told the roughly 280 online attendees that certain contracts are simply being renewed or extended, rather than re-advertised.

Many contracts that were up this year have been extended to “give us time to get dispatched from the COVID response and be able to focus back on our regular PD operations,” Shell said. But there are still many opportunities for vendors, she noted, including a couple under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP):

• On the state’s Cloud FedRAMP Moderate contract, “We should have full award in the middle of this month,” Shell said. “We do have three new contracts that we’ll be putting (out) that are in addition to the existing contracts that are already out there.”
• On FedRAMP High and existing FedRAMP Moderate contracts, which will expire June 14, 2021, Shell said DGS is working with CDT “to determine how those contracts will move forward. The ones that we’re going to be awarding this month are going to be tied with those that are expiring in 2021.”
• Contracts for PC goods are being extended to June 30, 2022. Some have already been extended; some are in the process. “We have a tablet contract that will expire Sept. 18, 2021,” she noted. “We have a new solicitation that will be released this month, and we expect award of new contracts sometime in the spring of 2021.”
• A contract for Sharp copiers has been extended to May 2022. “We do have one under review right now for Canon; we expect to extend that contract, as well,” Shell said. Printer contracts expire in August. DGS is working on a new solicitation, “and we hope it will be published on Cal eProcure before the end of the year, with an award in spring,” she said.
• On the state’s Software Licensing Program (SLP), Shell said, DGS is “working currently with several of our software publishers to look at future volume licensing discount models for the state, given the amount of IT spend that we’re seeing.  We’re looking to potentially veer a bit from our traditional model on some of our SLP contracts to see if we can’t get volume discounts. We’ll be reaching out to two vendors on an as-needed basis.”
• On Master Service Agreements for IT consulting services, Shell noted that the state has stopped accepting new applications to the IT MSA. “The reason we’ve done that is to prepare for the new contract solicitation that will be coming out, hopefully, before the end of the calendar year, and we anticipate having a fully awarded new contract by April of 2021,” she said. “We continue to work on ensuring that we have the right type of classifications in the contract, rates of pay — those are all things that we’ve talked with industry over the years about, and we continue to talk, and we are looking at making sure that that contract can be maximized for the state of California as well as having our vendors able to participate in a beneficial manner, as well.”
• Notably, Shell said, DGS is also working to streamline the state bidding process “as well as using our innovative procurement processes … RFI2 process, all of those things.”

Shell also advised vendors who want to do business with the state to register on Cal eProcure.

Other noteworthy updates from the presentation:

• Ellen Ishimoto, the state’s acting chief technology officer, noted that “critical systems aren’t keeping up at the Data Center,” and she said the state must address “outdated hardware and software.” She also said state IT leaders are looking at expanding SD-WAN (software-defined networking in a wide-area network) and managed services.
• Pam Haase, chief of statewide technology policy for CDT, said the state is looking at expanding the use of artificial intelligence — an area of opportunity for vendors. She said CDT is considering a statewide AI vendor pool, and she noted that long-term state AI policies are being discussed, but no immediate action is expected.
• Manveer Bola, the state deputy chief technology officer, said IT leaders are in the early stages of formulating a statewide strategy for the use of geographic information systems (GIS), likely to come out next year. That would reflect the elevated role of state Geographic Information Officer Carlos Isaac Cabrera, who is also the state’s manager of Data and Geospatial Services. Cabrera was appointed to the role in April. Bola also noted that the state is diversifying its use of cloud providers to ensure backup capabilities, and it’s exploring quantum computing technology, an area with inherent security challenges.    

The session ended with questions from vendors, and Techwire will report on those questions and their answers in coming days. The session was recorded, and once the video is posted online, Techwire will publish the link.