The National Institutes of Health's Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center is awarding $20 billion in IT work. The money will be disbursed among 65 companies across the country.

NIH announced the government-wide acquisition contract, which it refers to as GWAC, April 17.

Of the 65 companies awarded what NIH calls a CIO-CS contract, 44 are small businesses across multiple socioeconomic categories. There are eight HUBZones, 14 women-owned, six 8(a), seven economically disadvantaged women-owned small businesses and six service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses. All awardees went through a competitive source selection process to ensure the most technically capable and competitively priced solutions will be available over the next 10 years, according to NIH.

CIO-CS follows the awards of the CIO-SP3.

"Our vision was to create a strong suite of contracts which meet the IT needs of not only NIH but the entire federal landscape," Diane J. Frasier, director of the office of Acquisition and Logistics Management and head of the contracting activity at NIH, said in a statement.

"With its emphasis on cloud and managed services, we expect CIO-CS to appeal to a broad base of customers throughout the government tasked with implementing IT solutions," added Brian Goodger, associate director of the NIH Office of Acquisitions and Logistics Management.

"We will continue to build strong relationships with our customers through superior customer service and quality contracting," added Robert Coen, NITAAC program director, in a statement. The contract, he said, "introduces a new, highly select community now poised to serve the federal government's emerging, next generation information technology needs within a culture that embraces uncompromising quality and bold innovation."

"This GWAC offers IT commodity-enabling and shared solutions both on-site and in the cloud," NIH officials said. It includes services such as deployment and installation, maintenance and training, engineering studies, enterprise licenses and extended warranties, everything-as-a-service, mobility, collaboration, web and video-conferencing, cyber security, big data, virtualization and health and biomedical IT.

The 65 winners selected for the award can be found here.