A key Lockheed Martin [LMT] executive expects final negotiations to wrap up by the end of September for a potential $1 billion deal to centralize data centers for Australia’s defense department.
Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Solutions Vice President for Enterprise Information Technology (IT) Angela Heise told Defense Daily Wednesday the company performed about 100 workshops this year refining requirements and walking Australia through the details relevant to the company’s bid. Heise told Defense Daily in 2013 that the deal would shrink the number of data centers and data rooms from 280 to 11 (Defense Daily; May 20, 2013).
According to the Australian defense department’s chief information officer (CIO) group, Lockheed Martin beat out IBM [IBM] in May to become “preferred tenderer” for the program, formally known as Australian CIO Group Defence Centralised Processing. The two companies prevailed last September in a previous downselect from a group that included Hewlett-Packard [HPC]. Neither HP nor IBM responded to requests for comment Wednesday. Lockheed Martin spokesman Colin Thorn said Wednesday the company would not say if it was selected as preferred tenderer for the program.
Heise said Lockheed Martin’s advantage in the “CIO G” competition was its bevy of experience in the last decade consolidating data centers.
“We went through our own data center consolidation efforts across the corporation and we actually consolidated down to, I believe, three primary data centers,” Heise said. “We really leveraged that experience and our ability to take multiple different organizations that operated independently to be able to consolidate and share information across the entire organization.”
Australia in 2009 initiated a Defense Strategic Reform Program aiming to deliver gross savings of $18.6 billion over 10 years, $1.8 billion of which is to be delivered through defense IT reform. The primary objective of the Centralised Processing project is to establish a single, integrated capability for the management and provision of data center facilities, infrastructure, and services at low-, medium- and high-levels of classification.
Heise also said Lockheed Martin was awarded an anticipated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) contract worth around $107 million to provide IT services to the organization’s new headquarters in Brussels. Formally known as Active Network Infrastructure (ANWI), Heise said the company had a successful preliminary design review (PDR) and performed five different critical design reviews (CDR) on-time.
Lockheed Martin also set up an integration and test lab, Heise said, but the company has to wait for the headquarters’ construction to complete before it can lay fiber optics. There will be 4,500 IT users in the new NATO headquarters, which the organization said is expected to be completed by early 2016.
Heise said the Australia and NATO deals were so important to Lockheed Martin that company executives moved them out of her organization and into a division that she called “global group” earlier this year.