U.K.-headquartered BAE Systems said a unit in the United States was awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract with a $300 million ordering ceiling over five years including option years with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to modernize the agency’s Defense Department Information System trusted computer workstations.
The company will do this by creating a worldwide virtualized desktop infrastructure for DIA users and intelligence analysts. The contract has a $300 million ordering ceiling over a five-year period, including option years.
As the prime contractor for the Next Generation Desktop Environment (NGDE), BAE Systems will create a multiple security level, multi-intelligence analyst environment that maintains DIA’s compliance with DoD standards for intelligence systems and applications.
“BAE Systems is proud to provide the tools necessary to help DIA further its goal of making military intelligence analysts even more productive,” said Rick Schieffelin, vice president and general manager of Mission Solutions for BAE Systems. “It is our hope that BAE Systems’ Next Generation Desktop Environment will also set the stage for other members of the intelligence community to have access to a secure, flexible and affordable solution.”
The upgraded workstations created by BAE Systems are intended to provide analysts with high-performance access to critical applications requiring less maintenance and offering greater control over software licenses, versions and updates. In order to achieve these benefits, complex 3D graphics, computationally demanding software tools, and software–such as streaming video–will be accessed through a server rather than maintaining software on individual desktops.
Additionally, NGDE workstations also leverage Trusted Computing Solution’s SecureOfficer Trusted Thin Clientr cross-domain solution, allowing users to access appropriate applications and data from different security levels.
This five-year contract is an extension of the NGDE pilot phase conducted earlier in 2010 that successfully deployed and evaluated a number of workstations worldwide in a fully operational environment.