Navy To End 10-year Nework Outsourcing Deal

The Navy Marine Corps Intranet outsourcing contract comes to an end next year, and its pending expiration brings both relief and a looming unanswered question for the Navy.


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CANES to consolidate shipboard networks


The relief comes because managing the critical and expensive system at arm’s length has been difficult, and the system's contractor has had a number of difficulties in meeting demand over the years. But while the Navy has sent clear signals that it will take a more active role in the ownership and hands-on management of NMCI’s successor, its not at all clear just how the Navy will accomplish that after the contract expires in September 2010.

Industry will still play a role in building and supporting the Next-Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), though perhaps not using the sole provider model. The Navy is exploring the idea of breaking down network operations into different functional parts.

Navy leaders expect that retaking control will give them enterprise network services that are more responsive to their evolving administrative and warfighter needs than was possible with NMCI. As beneficial as it is, doing so will test the Navy’s ability to manage multiple but interconnected technologies and contracts, observers say.


When the Navy awarded the $9.9 billion NMCI contract to EDS in 2000, it gave the company a mandate to supply IT services to 700,000 onshore users, mostly in the United States. The Navy governed the contract by measuring the company’s performance in delivering those services.

It was a hands-off approach, and EDS — now a division of Hewlett-Packard — shouldered the burden of consolidating a continent’s worth of disparate networks and unequal technology maturity levels into a centralized whole.


But as information assurance and the threat of cyber warfare become more prevalent concerns, the Navy’s NGEN program office is examining ways to improve the service’s control over its network. The Navy estimates it will have an acquisition strategy for NGEN no later than the early summer, and the service is still far from issuing implementation details.

http://fcw.com/articles/2009/02/23/navy-ngen-and-nmci-transition.aspx