By Nick Wakeman,
Editor-in-Chief, Washington Technology

A whole new category of protests could open up for situations where prime contractors decide to custom-build their solutions.

A federal court has ruled that a commercial company can protest if its product is not part of a solution that a prime contractor proposes for a customer.

If the decision holds, it could send shockwaves through the contracting community because it would create a brand new category of protests when prime contractors decide to custom-build the solution instead of using a commercial product.

For the case at hand, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded a $376.4 million contract called SAFFIRE in 2021 to CACI International for an intelligence analysis tool.

Percipient.ai filed a protest in January 2023 at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, arguing that its commercial product should be part of CACI’s solution.

NGA underutilized the demos that Percipient offered, Percipient claims in its protest. CACI also evaluated Percipient’s Mirage product, which is used to analyze unstructured data.

Percipient claims that because its product is commercial, federal procurement laws require government agencies to use that offering instead of building something new from scratch.

It is a similar argument that Palantir used to fight its way onto the Army Distributed Common Ground Systems-A program for battlefield intelligence technology. But in that situation, Palantir wanted to pursue the opportunity as a prime and compete against Raytheon.

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