As a federal contractor, you may think you are well acquainted with the System for Award Management (SAM) platform. After all, contractors must keep an active registration in SAM.gov to be eligible for contracting opportunities from federal customers. To keep an active registration, you need to regularly, at least annually, update and renew your company’s SAM registration. However, since many contractors only login to SAM.gov once a year to complete this, you may be shocked by the number of changes to SAM.gov over the past year. As such, I will be going over some of these changes so that you are prepared the next time you log in to SAM.gov.

GSA has been developing a slew of Information Technology (IT)-related contracts recently from Polaris, to the Ascend Cloud Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) and now Alliant 3. GSA has recently released the draft Request for Proposal (RFP) for Alliant 3, one of the largest contracts in the works that will focus on the acquisition of advanced and emerging IT technologies. Alliant 3, a follow on from Alliant 2, will be a government-wide Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) Best-in-Class (BIC) contract, with an estimated ceiling of $75 billion. Since all questions and comments on the draft RFP are due on January 6, 2023, we’re going to cover what you need to know about this upcoming contract vehicle so your company can get involved early on.

As the pandemic lingers, the demand for goods and services continue to be a spending trend among government agencies. To respond to this crisis and other health-related emergencies, state and local governments are able to purchase items from GSA Schedules by participating in GSA’s Public Health Emergencies (PHE) Program. This program allows some non-federal entities to use the GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program for essential public health emergency supplies.

The Information Technology (IT) field is one of the largest and most competitive fields in federal contracting. Because of this, there are many contractors to compete with and consequently, a need to differentiate your business from others to be more successful in the federal marketplace. To do this, a savvy contractor needs to know the unique practices of GSA Schedule marketing.

In the past few years, change has been a constant in the GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program. From the consolidation to aligning North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes with Special Item Numbers (SINs), government contractors have needed to be very alert and flexible to change. As of October 27, 2022, we have more to add to that—the NAICS Association has released changes to NAICS Codes, which could affect your business. Here’s what you need to know about the NAICS Code changes and how you may be impacted.

For many organizations, the concept of “Zero Trust" has meant promising new approaches to tackling the complexities of network and data protection. While we’re seeing an increasing number of organizations setting aside budget and resources to kick off Zero Trust adoption, others are looking to Zero Trust as a “point solution” to address their immediate needs. In either case, organizations face daunting challenges when implementing a new solution, and a change of mindset in how they view cybersecurity solutions is needed.