The General Services Administration wants to give agencies three choices to move commodity technology to providers of cloud computing services.

GSA issued a request for quotation late Monday for e-mail, office automation and electronic records management under a five-year blanket purchase agreement contract. GSA and the Defense Department are working together on the BPA through the SmartBuy and Enterprise Software initiatives.

The cloud computing contract has a ceiling of $2.5 billion over five years. Vendors must submit their bids by June 19 through the EBuy system. Questions about the RFQ should be submitted by May 20.

"The objective of this RFQ is to offer five key service offerings through Email-as-a-service (EaaS) providers for ordering activities," GSA states in the RFQ.

GSA is asking vendors to provide three mandatory services and two optional ones. Under the mandatory categories, vendors must provide e-mail-as-a-service, migration services and integration services. Contractors also can submit a bid to provide office automation-as-a-service, which includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, and records management-as-a-service, which includes records collection, organization, categorization, storage, metadata capture, physical record tracking, retrieval, use and disposition. Reference Article.