The U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) is seeking to reduce costs and improve efficiency across the intelligence community (IC) by creating a new Commercial Data Consortium, which would centralize access to commercial data sources.

The consortium would act as a shared hub for vendor negotiations, cost-sharing, and policy compliance — ultimately enabling IC agencies to reduce duplication and streamline commercial data use.

According to IARPA, the IC’s current commercial data acquisition model is fragmented and inefficient, resulting in redundant purchases, siloed access and underutilized enterprise licenses.

To address the issue, IARPA proposes a centralized, government-funded consortium that provides access to commercially available information through API queries, platform-based tools, and bulk data downloads.

“The IC has a commercial data acquisition duplication problem and a costly commercial data replication and storage problem. The Government is seeking to award OTs to small businesses, nontraditional defense contractors, or traditional defense contractors if they propose significant involvement from a nontraditional contractor or provide a one-third cost share, with potential for follow-on sole-source sustainment contracts, to manage a commercial data consortium that unifies commercial data acquisition then enables IC users to access and interact with this commercial data in one place on unclassified systems while reducing data copying to classified computer systems,” the agency said in a SAM.gov posting.

To make the initiative a success, the agency is specifically seeking a “zero copy” technical model that keeps data stored on the vendor’s infrastructure to minimize replication and cloud storage costs.

Interested vendors have until April 28 to respond.