Contextualizing ASTRO for the future of Defense
After several years of managing cyber contracts at Booz Allen, I joined the Business Development Center of Excellence to do Defense Capture and Tactical Selling. From this position, I learned about several US Defense Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract vehicles scattered across various acquisition offices and the competitive advantages and disadvantages they had for winning business. It was my job to look at the macro picture of where and how Booz Allen could deliver the best possible services to a customer and which ID/IQ contract vehicle could be the best conduit.
In this role, everyone understood that the holy grail was to link a customer with a vast scope of need and lots of funding to FEDSIM so that ultimately, we could capture and compete for a large Task Order under either Alliant or OASIS with FEDSIM at the helm of the acquisition. Simply put, Alliant was a massive ID/IQ contract that supported any scope of work for IT, and OASIS supported the scope of work necessary to do most anything else for customers. As the charts below indicate, we were very successful at implementing this strategy.
But now there’s an even better ID/IQ contract vehicle in place: ASTRO. ASTRO is a family of 10 multi-award ID/IQ contract vehicles that support services delivery (i.e. labor) for data operations, training, research and development, and other key areas, and more importantly, span all Defense military domains: Ground, Air, Sea, and Space.
What’s most remarkable about ASTRO is how few primes there really are per each ordering pool, and that the family of ID/IQs has a base ordering period of 11/15/2021 - 11/14/2026, and an option ordering period extending through 11/14/2031. For example, there are only 25 companies that can be awarded prime contracts under the Space pool, so they are who you have to work with through 2031!
So how do Commercial Technology companies fit under ASTRO?
Well, the prime awardees are allowed to purchase, “tools, equipment, hardware, software and other commodities such as licenses, maintenance, etc… if integral to and necessary for the in-scope service-based solution.”
So the answer is… partner with a prime that’s mapped to your technology’s relevance as mapped to the ASTRO contract, and you can gain market share. You want to. Just look at the 9 FEDSIM ASTRO procurements in development as of today September 2023.
