On December 31, 2020 the General Services Administration released a draft request for proposal (RFP) to collect feedback from interested parties on a new governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC). The new GWAC, which will be called “Polaris”, will replace the much-maligned (and altogether cancelled) Alliant 2 Small Business solicitation.
With an anticipated ceiling of $15 billion, this is significant news for Information Technology (IT) and IT services-based vendors who want to offer their services on a potentially lucrative interagency contracting vehicle. And a draft RFP is a great way to get ahead of an opportunity before it formally goes out for bid.
To support GSA and deliver on our own mission of creating open government markets, we decided to take advantage of our market intelligence platform GovShop to identify vendors that would be a good fit for Polaris, but who may not be aware of this government business opportunity. Not only will this create more opportunities for non-traditional and emerging market companies, we hope it will result in better, more diverse feedback on the draft solicitation so GSA can make improvements and avoid a repeat of Alliant 2’s fate.
Using GovShop to find relevant, innovative companies in IT services
Contracting professionals can find companies on GovShop in three ways: keyword search, commodity code (NAICS & PSC) search, or by searching multi agency vehicles. We decided to start our search with the NAICS code associated with the draft RFP, 541512 “Computer Systems Design Services.”
We found 49,483 companies that have that particular NAICS code in their GovShop profile, a healthy number to be sure, but not unexpected given the size of this particular industry subset. We used our socioeconomic designation filter to see how many of those companies were in the mentioned pool of HubZone, WOSB, or Small Businesses and narrowed down to 11,667 results.
A joke around our office is that no contracting professional needs a search database to find Oracle, so our next step was to apply additional filters to specifically identify emerging technology firms who could provide unique perspectives in response to the draft RFP. Our goal: to narrow our results to 15 dark-horse candidates, evenly split across the WOSB, HubZone and Small Business category using GovShop and encourage them to get involved with Polaris.
Here’s how we did it, and the results we found.
Conducting better market research using GovShop
The first thing we needed to do was make sure that all 11,667 of the companies we found in our first filtering would be eligible to compete as a small business under the $30 million size standard related to the 541512 NAICS Code. We used the annual revenue filter to pare down the suppliers, but still had quite a large list of 3,197 suppliers.
Using the NAICS Code methodology gave us a good start, but GSA, under the Polaris solicitation, is also looking for cutting edge technology solution providers. Specifically, the Polaris RFP states, “the NAICS code selected for the Master Contract is designated as 541512, Computer Systems Design Services; however, other IT NAICS codes are acceptable if the principal nature of the resulting task order is for IT services.” We included areas like merging technologies; advanced and quantum computing; automation technology; Artificial Intelligence (AI); distributed ledger technology; and edge computing to make our search robust.
To continue refining our target, we decided to focus on one characteristic that many emerging, innovative companies have in common: the earning of a small business innovation research grant (SBIR). GovShop has a filter for that, which we applied to our list of companies we found above. This narrowed our list down to 215, and we were able to spend time reviewing the scope of those research efforts against the desired technology Polaris areas.
To find 5 innovative vendors with HubZone certifications, I adjusted my socioeconomic filter search to just focus on those companies, and used the SBIR I, II and III filters to arrive at just 8 companies. Success! I added them to a list that I could refer back to in my market research (free account required, create one here), and then repeated the same steps for WOSB and Small Business filters, adding the most relevant contractor profiles to lists for each certification.
So within about 45 minutes of searching around and reviewing company profiles, we were able to use GovShop to find 15 quality companies that met the criteria we set for ourselves, and who will be a great fit for the Polaris opportunity.
Is your company on this list? Review the categories and profiles below. If not, maybe you need to take some time to update your free company profile on GovShop?
Small Business Companies
WOSB Companies
HubZone Companies
To learn more about how GovShop can support your next market research task (or to help your company show up on more market research lists), contact our team and schedule a demo. We look forward to helping you on your government contracting journey!
