INL Guatemala Automated Biometric Identification System

The Department of State Office of Acquisition Management seeks a firm-fixed-price Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) platform and infrastructure for the Guatemalan Migration Institute, with proposals due August 31, 2026 and questions due August 14. The procurement is a competitive 8(a) set-aside, foreclosing competition outside the 8(a) program.

Place of performance is Guatemala City for installation and training, with hardware delivery to a freight forwarder in Doral, Florida within 90 days of award. The solution must support multimodal biometric recognition (fingerprint, facial, iris) with capacity for 160 million fingerprints, 16 million facial records, and 32 million iris records, processing up to 3,000 passport enrollments and 270,000 migration records daily with sub-second response times. The platform must use Neurotechnology MegaMatcher ABIS or equivalent with REST/gRPC APIs and C# SDK; Proxmox VE 8.4.4 and Proxmox Backup Server 4.0.18 for virtualization and backup; and active-active high-availability architecture at the primary site with geographic replication to a secondary disaster recovery site. Hardware Security Module for data protection in transit is required. All software licenses must remain active for the full three-year warranty period.

Deliverables include ABIS platform software, infrastructure and server hardware, installation and integration services (September 7, 2026–September 6, 2027), 50 hours of instructor-led technical training in Spanish (October 15, 2026–February 19, 2027), and comprehensive Factory and Site Acceptance Testing. Training must cover ABIS administrators, infrastructure administrators, and software developers across full-stack solution components. The solicitation is PSC 7H20 (IT and Telecom–Platform Products) and NAICS 518210 (Data Processing and Hosting Services). Evaluation uses cost-technical tradeoff methodology with technical factors—infrastructure architecture (25%), ABIS software platform (30%), warranty and training (15%), and past performance in Central/South America biometric deployments within the last three to five years (30%)—weighted significantly more important than price. All quotes must remain valid for a minimum of 90 days. Proposals must be submitted via email in two volumes with strict formatting: Volume I (Technical) limited to 50 pages excluding cover letter, table of contents, resumes, and past performance data; Volume II (Cost/Price) with detailed pricing schedules in U.S. dollars. Universal Strategy Group, Inc. will assist in evaluation.