Treasury sets up BPAs for companies competing with Dell
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The Treasury Department last month signed three blanket purchasing agreements for file servers, laser printers, PCs, routers and software, in deals that set up competition for its heavyweight supplier, Dell Computer Corp. Under the Treasury Department Acquisition BPAs, Presidio Corp. of Lanham, Md., will provide IBM Corp. portables, PCs and servers, and Government Technology Services Inc. of Chantilly, Va., will sell the same types of products from Compaq Computer Corp., IRS contracting officer Greg Roseman said.
The Treasury Department last month signed three blanket purchasing agreements for file
servers, laser printers, PCs, routers and software, in deals that set up competition for
its heavyweight supplier, Dell Computer Corp.
Under the Treasury Department Acquisition BPAs, Presidio Corp. of Lanham, Md., will
provide IBM Corp. portables, PCs and servers, and Government Technology Services Inc. of
Chantilly, Va., will sell the same types of products from Compaq Computer Corp., IRS
contracting officer Greg Roseman said.
ComTeq Federal Inc. of Rockville, Md., will resell Micron Electronics Inc. desktop and
portable PCs and servers as well as 3Com Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. peripherals, said
Paul Gill, ComTeq business development manager.
ComTeq is partnering with Micron of Nampa, Idaho, while it adds Micron products to its
General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule contract.
The IRS plans to award at least one indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity TDA
contract by the end of next month, said James Shotwell, deputy trail boss for the Treasury
Distributed Processing Infrastructure at the IRS. There will be a follow-on small business
set-aside award, but IRS officials have not yet decided whether to run a full-and-open
TDA-3 procurement.
The IRS is offering users three more brands of products, Roseman said. IRS officials
earlier had set up a BPA with IntelliSys Technology Corp. of Fairfax, Va., to resell Dell
products. More power to Dell if they can make more sales, he said.
GTSI primarily sold Compaq products on its TDA-1 contract, which expired Sept. 30, said
Joel Lipkin, GTSI vice president of business development. Win Laboratories Ltd. of
Manassas, Va., an 8(a) vendor, held a TDA-2 contract that recently expired, he said.
Some vendors have estimated that Dell sells more than $80 million worth of PCs and
servers each year to Treasury, giving the company a large market share. Both ComTeq and
Presidio are small businesses.
It took IRS officials about 30 days to set up the BPAs, said Shotwell, who would not
estimate how much Treasury saved on the procurement. Each vendor spent $250,000 to
$300,000 less in bidding for the acquisition than they would have spent for an IDIQ
contract, he said.
They dont necessarily pass along the savings, but they appreciate the
lower cost of doing business with the government, he said.
The one-year BPAs are worth about $40 million each, Roseman said. The IRS, following
Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements, invited six vendors to bid, he said.
ComTeq and Presidio are giving Treasury buyers 20 percent discounts from their GSA
schedule prices, Roseman said. GTSI also gives significant discounts, Lipkin said.
Treasury buyers will pay $1,614 for a Micron ClientPro CP with 350-MHz Pentium II
processor, 64M of RAM, 512K Level 2 cache, 4M of video RAM, 6.4G hard drive and 17-inch
monitor, according to ComTeqs Web site at http://www.comteq.com/irs.htm.