Notice ID: 19AQMM25Q0270
Department/Ind. Agency: STATE, DEPARTMENT OF
Contract Award Date: Sep 19, 2025
Contract Award Number: 19AQMM25A1130
Authority: Only One Source
Requiring Activity: Bureau of Diplomatic Technology, Business Management & Planning, Office of IT Acquisitions (DT/BMP/ITA)
Approval is requested to limit the number of sources for soliciting and awarding an enterprise Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products and maintenance support under a Federal Supply Schedule contract for the supplies and/or services described in Section 3 on behalf of the Requiring Activity for a base year and up to four option years.
This requirement will be awarded on a firm fixed unit price (FFUP) basis under the General Services Administration (GSA) Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Government-wide acquisition contract (GWAC).
Description of Services
The Department of State (State) uses GCP as a unified cloud management platform supporting numerous core business functions including artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), data warehouses, virtual machines, and serverless compute. GCP is State’s enterprise-wide solution for text-to-speech/speech-to-text and automation applications. The GCP solution supports numerous mission-critical operations and business processes across bureaus, offices, and posts including, but not limited to, the Bureau of Diplomatic Technology (DT), Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA), Foreign Service institute (FSI), and Embassy, San Jose.
State customers manage critical State systems, applications, and workflows that rely on access to the full suite of GCP products and maintenance support to sustain operations. Additionally, State requires continued access to the full catalog of GCP offerings to support ongoing implementation, modernization, and capability enhancement to enable State to adapt to the dynamic and constantly evolving nature of its public diplomacy mission.
To support State’s ability to maximize the value of their unified cloud management platform including AI/ML, data warehouses, virtual machines, and serverless compute, State requires access to maintenance and supporting services from GCP certified experts to optimize aspects of the design and implementation of the myriad GCP products to maximize performance. State offices and bureaus require access to a streamlined acquisition vehicle for continued access to GCP’s full catalog of products and supporting services. Establishing a BPA for the full suite of GCP’s offerings will provide State offices and bureaus the ability to issue Call Orders to maintain mission specific cloud solutions and access to critical application support services that can enable customers to quickly and flexibly adapt to evolving requirements driven by global events through streamlined access to capable experts, who have deep reach-back directly to the publisher, GCP.
State’s existing cloud-based solutions and business processes rely on access to the full GCP product suite, maintenance, and supporting services provided by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), GCP. This acquisition is critical to ensure State offices and bureaus can maintain continuity of operations for critical systems relying on GCP’s commercial off the shelf (COTS) solution and access to market-leading unified cloud management platform that provides AI/ML, data warehouses, virtual machines, and serverless compute to support future needs and react quickly and flexibly to dynamic changes in State’s national security and diplomacy missions.
Market research was conducted, and State issued a Request for Information (RFI) in January 2025 to assess industry capabilities in providing proven COTS offering for a unified cloud management platform that provides AI/ML, data warehouses, virtual machines, and serverless compute. A total of 15 vendors submitted recommendations of potential COTS platforms that could meet all the core operational, mandatory technical, performance requirements described in State’s RFI (#19AQMM25B0100). A technical team from DT evaluated the responses. Six (6) vendor submissions recommended unspecified or unnamed solutions that could not be confirmed as COTS solutions or did not submit a singular COTS solution that could address all of the requirements detailed in State’s RFI. As such, the submissions were determined nonresponsive and did not receive further review. Of the remaining nine (9) vendor submissions, four (4) vendors did not fully detail or describe a COTS solution recommendation that could meet State’s operational and core technical requirements, including the ability to provide a commercially proven platform that can deliver all the mandatory requirements as listed under Section 2.1 of the RFI. As a result, these four (4) vendors recommended solutions were determined to be incompatible with the mandatory requirements and were not given further consideration.
The five (5) remaining vendor submissions recommended GCP as a single, vertically integrated platform solution that was capable of meeting all of State’s mandatory operational, security, key technical, and functional requirements for a cloud management platform. Based on the results obtained through the RFI/Sources Sought, the Government determined that Google/GCP is the only supplier capable of offering a singular COTS solution that can fully meet State’s requirements in the areas of text-to-speech, Speech-to-text, translation AI/ML, virtual machines, automation, and serverless compute, as well as provide functionality within a single, vertically integrated platform. Alternative original equipment manufacturer (OEM) solutions did not demonstrate the functionality, breadth of application offerings, centralized catalog of product offerings, and technical capabilities State requires for its mission specific implementations.
Additional unique capabilities and features that address on State’s highly specialized cloud platform requirements are GCP’s virtual machine (VM) service, Compute Engine, advance auto-scaling, user created custom metrics for auto-scaling, seamless integration with Kubernetes, and global load balancing integration.
• GCP’s Compute Engine offers advanced auto-scaling capabilities that allows applications to automatically adjust resources based on demand. This ensures optimal performance and through the predictive autoscaling, GCP creates VMs ahead of anticipated demand. This allows time for applications to initialize before workload arrives, which reduces latency and ensures a smoother user experience, especially for applications that may have long initialization times.
• GCP’s auto-scaling capabilities are tightly integrated with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This allows for efficient scaling of containerized applications, leveraging Kubernetes’ native auto-scaling features along with GCP’s advanced capabilities.
• GCP’s auto-scaling works in conjunction with its global load balancing services. This ensures that traffic is distributed efficiently across multiple regions and zones, providing high availability and reliability for applications. GCP’s global load balancers offer features such as single global load balancing IP address, optimized traffic management, and seamless multi-region failover, which is advantageous for a globally dispersed organization like State that needs a virtual private cloud (VPC) that can simplify setting up multi-region architectures instead of limiting an organization to single regional-based VPCs.
• GCP’s solution allows users to create and use custom metrics for auto-scaling. This provides more flexibility and control over how resources are scaled based on specific application needs and performance indicators.
The GCP solution integrates these core capabilities into a unified and consistent user experience on a unified, single, vertically integrated platform, which meets State’s requirements and is essential for State’s primary use cases highlighted in Section 3 above. Given the importance of State’s global missions, the need across State to access a market-leading unified cloud management platform that delivers on State’s mandatory and core technical requirements to include integrating AI/ML, virtual machines, serverless compute, and data warehouses, as well as provide global load balancing that can be distributed across multiple regions at once along with advanced auto-scaling capabilities. Such offerings are proprietary to and offered by the OEM, GCP. These highly specialized capabilities are essential to maintain State offices and bureaus’ ability to effectively address their globally dispersed mission objectives.
The Contracting Officer (CO) has determined the anticipated contract action will represent the best value based on the CO’s plan to follow the procedures in FAR 8.405. Contracts awarded under GSA schedules are already deemed fair and reasonable, and the solicitation will request Offerors’ proposed prices be discounted from their GSA schedule prices. Although approval is requested to contract with one source, the CO will not award the planned contract action unless the CO evaluates and determines that the price is fair and reasonable.
In accordance with FAR 8.405-6()(2)(B)) this Justification and Approval will be posted. Any responses will be annotated and considered for use in future procurements similar to this one. In addition, State will continue to conduct market research to determine if any other alternative COTS software OEMs can provide a centralized, cloud management platform similar to and compatible with existing GCP and can fulfill State’s core cloud management technical requirements.
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