Air Force holding industry day for VAULT data support contract

The Air Force is reaching out to industry suppliers who can provide data science support as part of a multiple-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with a potential total value of up to $100 million to $500 million.

The opportunity will help the service ensure "data is visible, accessible, understandable, linked and trusted [VAULT] across the air, space and cyberspace domains in order to support data-driven operational decisions," according to slides released on the Federal Business Opportunities website Sunday.

More specifically, the contractors will help transform data into a ready format for the analytical or systems development communities, provide principles and policy to guide data management, develop algorithms for execution on cloud and on-premise infrastructure and conduct analytics using artificial intelligence.

The service is informing potential contractors of requirements during an industry day event today and tomorrow at the Air National Guard Readiness Center at Joint Base Andrews, MD. Sherri Hanson, director of operations in the Air Force Chief Data Office, is expected to present.

The slides state that according to the service's projected acquisition milestones for the contract, which are subject to change, a draft request for proposals will be released in December, followed by a solicitation in January and proposal deadline in February. An award is expected to be made in April, and the ordering period will be between May 2020 and May 2025.

The slides list several data challenges the Air Force faces today, saying the service is "unable to access health and readiness because of limited access to data," "cannot perform robust analytics to make mission decisions," and confronts a growing problem of generating "more data every second and . . . holding data hostage in data jails."

CDO addresses these problem areas with the VAULT data platform that uses an agile approach, prioritizes cloud-native services followed by open-source software, is vendor and product agnostic, has a flexible architecture and decouples compute and storage, per the slides.