Notice ID RFQ1559853 Description On September 30, 2021, the General Services Administration (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), Information Technology Category (ITC) issued a Request for Information (RFI) in GSA eBuy and SAM.gov indicating GSA's intent to establish, on a competitive basis, a Multiple Award Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) against the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Special Item Numbers 518210C "Cloud and Cloud-Related IT Professional Services" and 54151S "IT Professional Services"; now known as the “Ascend” BPA (formerly referred to as the “GSA Government-Wide Cloud BPA”). This supplemental special notice is being issued to further engage and collaborate with industry and agencies to gather feedback on the attached Draft Performance Work Statement (PWS). It remains GSA’s intent to award the Ascend BPA in a phased manner as a featured part of GSA's Cloud Marketplace. We plan to make multiple awards in each pool, each with its specific scope that will allow all Federal Agencies and Other Eligible Activities to acquire and implement secure, integrated commercial cloud service solutions, including cloud-focused labor services, including but not limited to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud-Related Information Technology (IT) Professional Services. We encourage all parties who are interested in participating in the Ascend BPA acquisition (formerly known as the GSA Governmentwide Cloud BPA) to review the attached draft PWS and provide questions, comments and recommended answer/solution rationale on the attached Table 1 - Ascend BPA Draft PWS Questions/Comments/Recommended Answer/Solution and Rationale Spreadsheet by not later than 4:00 pm EST on 06/06/2022. Objectives The objective of this BPA is to provide a streamlined method for government agencies to acquire and implement secure, integrated commercial cloud service solutions, including cloud focused labor services through the award of a BPA in accordance with FAR 8.4. These services will be epitomized by driving towards the delivery of quality services within rapid time frames, utilization of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), Anything as a Services (XaaS) and related cloud Information Technology (IT) professional services to create an “open-source”-like experience. This will enable full data accessibility, ownership, and portability for the government and facilitates a government model for the reuse of common applications that would function across multiple agencies. To achieve this goal, industry partners must be able to implement secure cloud service solutions utilizing zero trust architecture cybersecurity baselines that leverage Development, Security, and Operations (DevSecOps) and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) agile processes that achieve results through continuous capability enhancements, minimal downtime, prompt response to emerging needs, demonstrated reliability and availability, and optimized performance with minimized resource utilization. Scope The scope of the BPA is further broken down into the following independent primary pools with respective independent sub-pools as identified by the Government. Future capability offerings and/or emerging technologies within the defined scope of the overall Pool structure requirements will be assessed for on-ramping under new sub-pool(s). BPA Task Orders (TOs) can be placed under one or all pools as necessary for the services required... Read more here. Related Item GSA RFI: Government-Wide Cloud BPA (October 5, 2021)