Nov-2017

54 55 cle of Application Development and Maintenance support. For the Small Business Administration (SBA), SBD2 conducted cost-benefit analysis of multiple software engineering alternatives for facili- tating their modernization efforts. For the Department of Interior (DOI), SBD2 provided Portal andWeb Development. For the Social SecurityAdministration (SSA), SBD2 provides Data Exchange and Warehouse Repository for more than 3 Terabytes of data. For the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), SBD2 is re- sponsible for ingesting, normalizing, and disseminating “big data,” including all insurance plans for Healthcare.gov.Most recently CMS awarded SBD2 the contract to replace the Provider Enrollment, Chain, and Ownership System (PECOS), an electronic Medicare enrollment system that will be built on a modern technology stack in a cloud environment to be flexible, scalable, and easy to use. “That’s been the path we’ve taken,”Goldbach says.“And we’ve experienced pretty high compounded growth over the last few years.”He admits, however, that there are some challenges in the federal contracting system: “This past year, some awards have been protested. Somebody that loses challenges the decision, and we’re kind of suffering a bit because there are a couple of protests that are delaying a cou- ple of awards that we recently received.The protests typically revolve around the government’s evaluation of the proposals–whether the pricing was fair, or whether their proposal was given adequate evalu- ation.That’s one challenging part with federal con- tracting–sometimes you don’t knowwhat ultimately will happen and sometimes it takes years to get an award.However,we were recently notified that a pro- test over SBD2’s largest contract award to date was denied.Now it’s time to get to work!” Another challenge for companies such as SBD2 is the constant changes in federal programs and leg- islation that directly affect department budgets and thus the availability of contracts.“We support the Affordable Care Act on the insurance carrier side,” Goldbach says.“So, legislation and change around that could potentially have an impact on us–it might be positive, it might not; we don’t know for sure.That’s an area we’re tracking.And there’s a lot of concern about the EPA–they’re trying to reduce a lot of the EPA budget.We recently had a contract at EPA terminated due to budget reductions and insourced for agency staff to perform.All part of being a federal contractor.” “The government has relatively,well-defined cri- teria against which to evaluate proposals,”Goldbach continues.“What they’re looking for is a company that can demonstrate that they’ve done it before: ‘Can you cite other contracts similar in size, scope and SOLUTIONS BY DESIGN II LLC AT A GLANCE SOLUTIONS BY DESIGN II LLC WHAT: An information technology and consulting services company WHERE: Vienna, Virginia WEBSITE: www.sbd.com