Last week, NASA announced a plan to pull together a NASA-wide integrated acquisition for IT Support Services, dubbed I3P for IT Infrastructure Improvement Program. This program includes portions of two of NASA's biggest IT Programs, UNITeS, and ODIN. The future status of these programs is uncertain at this time, since I3P includes a large portion, and possibly, the whole workload for these programs.

This acquisition underlines a growing trend in the federal market toward consolidating similar IT contracts to take advantage of economies of scale when buying agency-wide IT services. Required by the Office of the Chief Information Officer, this acquisition is a shift away from the traditional Mission Center oriented acquisitions.

Consolidation does have its critics, but some the advantages for Government appear to be as follows:

• Less cost administering a myriad of contracts that cover the same basic requirements
• Savings by leveraging economies of scale (NASA as a whole has more spending power than any one Mission Center)

The cons for contractors are:

• Less contracts/opportunities for competition
• More competition, larger acquisitions tend to attract more attention and more competition

I3P is in the planning stages and the pros and cons are all assumptions at this point, and their true nature will not been revealed until the acquisition strategy is determined. An Industry Day is already planned for July 23, 2008, and more details about this acquisition will be revealed to Industry after the initial Industry Day.