Customs and Border Protection (CBP) yesterday said it expects to award a contract for the Integrated Fixed Tower (IFT) program late in the fourth quarter of FY ’13 after conducting operational evaluations of systems it deems to be in the competitive range.
The agency expects to conduct System Maturity and Deployment Capability Demonstrations in the middle of the third quarter of FY ’13, which runs from April through June. CBP said in a FedBizOpps posting yesterday that the demonstrations will occur “after the competitive range decision has been made for only those offerors within the competitive range.”
So far, Boeing [BA], General Dynamics [GD], the DRS Technologies division of Italy’s Finmeccanica, Lockheed Martin [LMT], Northrop Grumman [NOC] and Raytheon [RTN] have publicly announced that they submitted bids for the IFT program. Bids were due in May 2012, a little more than a month after the Request for Proposals was released.
The expected IFT contract award is nearly a year after the original plan, which was for December 2012, but CBP has said previously that the contract would be delayed because it received more proposals than expected.
Under the IFT program, CBP is seeking non-developmental technologies, and preferably commercially available, that can be deployed along select rural and remote stretches of the nation’s southwest border with Mexico to conduct electronic surveillance to counter illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The fixed towers would typically consist of day and night cameras and ground radar that is integrated into a security management tool at Border Patrol stations.