The Navy has delayed plans to award the contracts for the follow-on to the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) by three months, saying yesterday more time was needed to evaluate the proposals offered by the two industry teams competing for the lucrative program.
The Navy’s timeframe for awarding the contracts for the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) has now been postponed from February to May in the latest delay at introducing the successor to NMCI.
“Due to the complexities of the NGEN requirements, we are changing our contract award estimate in order to ensure a complete and thorough review of offerors’ bids,” Ed Austin, a spokesman for the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems, said.
Two industry teams are competing for separate contracts: one for enterprises services and a second for transport services. They could reach a total value of $5.3 billion over the next five years.
The delay in selecting a winner will have no immediate impact on plans to transition from NMCI to NGEN in the envisioned April 2014 timeframe, Austin said. Austin said the postponement decision was not a result of the budget uncertainty and the threat of sequestration on Capitol Hill, but cautioned that failing to resolve those issues could impact the newly revised plan for awarding NGEN.
The Navy issued the final request for proposals for NGEN last May, two years behind the original schedule and months later than revised plans to do so by the end of 2011.
NMCI incumbent Hewlett-Packard [HP] is leading a team consisting of Northrop Grumman [NOC], IBM [IBM], AT&T [T] and Lockheed Martin [LMT]. A second team has been formed by Harris Corp. [HRS] and Computer Sciences Corp. [CSC] and includes General Dynamics [GD] and Verizon Communications [VZ].
NGEN is intended to provide secure, net-centric data and services to 800,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel and connect 400,000 workstations. NMCI already represents the largest intranet in the U.S. government and began in 2000 under a contract with Electronic Data Systems, which HP acquired in 2008.
In a September report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) questioned whether the services could meet the transition timeframe, warning of potential cost overruns and delays. The GAO said the delays could force the Navy to reissue a continuity of services contract for NMCI that will add to the overall cost.
The Navy issued a continuity of services contract for NMCI in October 2010 that runs until the scheduled April 2014 transition schedule.
The Navy’s chief information officer, Terry Halvorsen, told reporters in November that the Department of the Navy has been working to identify and resolve potential technical problems to ensure a smooth transition to NGEN (Defense Daily, Nov. 28, 2012).
“I suspect we won’t move at all without a little bit of a hiccup, but I’m hoping that’s all there is and I think we are doing all the right things to make that happen,” Halvorsen said.