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Neal Fox | Contracting in Perspective: GSA's Networx—Will it connect with users?

Contracting in Perspective

By Neal Fox, Special to GCN

GSA Networx, the next-generation telecom and networking contract from the General Services Administration, has garnered its share of news. That’s good for magazine sales, but bad for GSA, which announced a surprising eight-month delay in the contract award shortly after proposals were received. That is more than 16 long months from receipt of proposals to anticipated award. And that could easily slip again given the track record on this contract. What gives?

Networx is another in a series of governmentwide telecom contracts from GSA. Its predecessors, including the current FTS 2001, were very successful, and are credited with bringing down the cost of phone service for the federal government, and by extension, for other telecom customers as well. For example, the cost of a long-distance phone call on GSA contracts has fallen from over 25 cents per minute to about a penny per minute during the life of these contracts. That is a good definition of success.

But times have changed. Telecom is converging into the realm of IT, which is to say telecom is fast becoming just another component of IT. Indeed, most telecom is already within the scope of GSA’s IT Schedule and existing Government Wide Acquisition Contracts such as Millennia and ANSWER. Over the next few years, much of telecom will become IT-based, such as VOIP and other internet-based networking, as customers focus on IT services integrated with their telecom. So with the price of long-distance service hovering at that penny-per-minute level, plus the convergence of telecom into IT, a new approach to telecom contracting was in order.

Despite this, Networx took the worn path of least resistance, attempting to maintain telecom as a separate entity for another 10 years. But why?

GSA telecom and IT contracting folks were in separate parts of GSA when Networx was hatched, so that much-needed internal integration did not happen. The result was an old-government-style request for proposals that attempts to keep telecom separate from GSA IT contracts in spite of the rapid onset of convergence.

In this isolated state, Networx became an eclectic mix of offerings that maintains the separation between GSA telecom and IT contracts.

Networx is actually two contracts, Universal and Enterprise. Universal is for the big telecom companies, and Enterprise was supposed to do what Networx Universal could not, such as bring integrators and small businesses into the game.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Acquisition / Contracts, IT Management



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