Lockheed Martin [LMT] is pursuing a pair of international information technology (IT) contracts that could value approximately $1.1 billion, according to a key executive.
Lockheed Martin Vice President of Enterprise IT Solutions for Defense Angela Heise told Defense Daily last week the company is pursuing a $1 billion Australian defense department data center consolidation effort where Lockheed Martin would shrink the number of data centers and data rooms from 280 to 11. Heise said she expected an award for the program, known as Australian Chief Information Officer (CIO) Group Defence Centralised Processing, to be announced in the third or fourth quarter of 2013.
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| NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. Photo: NATO. |
Lockheed Martin is also pursuing a NATO IT contract called Active Network Infrastructure (ANWI), which is to provide IT services in NATO’s new headquarters in Brussels. According to a June 29 Invitation for Bid, the winning bidder will provide infrastructure capabilities like processing and storage for four security levels; wireless and wireless local area network (LAN) switching capabilities for four security levels installed and integrated with building and cabling infrastructure; communications capabilities consisting of the new headquarters’ telephone services, video teleconferencing, site security communications, internet protocol television (IPTV) and global system for mobile communications (GSM) services, among others.
Lockheed Martin spokesman John O’Sullivan said last week the winning bidder will provide information and communications technology (ICT) to 4,500 users in the new NATO headquarters. The ANWI contract is worth $107.3 million, according to the Invitation for Bid.
Accenture [ACN] spokeswoman Joanne Veto said last week although the company doesn’t discuss active bids, Australia’s defense department is an Accenture client. Veto said Accenture and the Australian defense department recently completed a major milestone in the migration of the department’s primary data center to a new facility in Sydney. Northrop Grumman spokeswoman Janis Lamar said Friday though she wasn’t sure if the company was bidding, or had bid, on the Australia contract, Northrop Grumman did support a number of defense and civil programs in Australia.
Heise said, if Lockheed Martin wins the Australia contract, its approach would be much like how it handled an Army Corps of Engineers data center consolidation a few years ago, in which it took a range of 50 to 70 disparate sites and made them able to be run like an enterprise. Heise said Australia’s defense department has very stovepiped organizations.
“To bring those together and truly get them onto an enterprise model (would be) pretty exciting,” Heise said.
Heise said Lockheed Martin recently performed an internal data center consolidation effort of its own. Heise said because the company was able to go from “dozens” of data centers across the country down to a couple core centers, it has benefited from not having to spend so much power keeping all the data centers running.
“It’s a significant investment to be able to have backup power, fire controls, security and everything else of those data centers,” Heise said. “Because bandwidth is, quite honestly, pretty readily available in most places, you reap a lot of benefits because you don’t have servers underutilized.”