The Navy is set to complete the transition to the next generation of the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) by Oct. 1 and is still cramming to complete the process to meet that target date.
Capt. Michael Abreu, the program manager for the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), told a small group of reporters on Wednesday that the transition on 74 percent of the Navy’s working stations has been finished, and that supporting infrastructure has been largely completed. He said the Navy is now moving to complete the “tail end” of the project.
Hewlett-Packard [HP], the incumbent for NMCI, is the prime industry partner for NGEN after winning the contract in June 2013 over a partnership consisting of Computer Sciences Corp. [CSC] and Harris Corp. [HRS]. The contract is valued at $3.5 billion over five years if all options are exercised.
Formal protests by the losing bidders, however, required a temporary stop in the transition until they were either rejected by Government Accountability Office or withdrawn.
Abreu said following the protests the Navy worked closely with HP to shrink the transition period from 13 months to 10 to stay on course for the Oct. 1 goal. The Marine Corps completed its transition earlier this year, Abreu said.
NMCI provides secure, net-centric data and services to 800,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel and connects to 400,000 workstations. NMCI is largest intranet in the U.S. government and began in 2000 under a contract with Electronic Data Systems, which HP acquired in 2008.
The first workstation transition took place June 1 at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., Abreu said, and the effort quickly ramped up in the subsequent months.
After October, the program office will then begin focusing on other tasks including continuously examining and improving cyber security and integrating other legacy systems into the NGEN model. Another key objective is the introduction of mobile devices into the network, such as Android phones and iPhones. The Navy already employs Blackberry devices.
A key aspect of NGEN is the restructuring of the contract arrangement for NMCI. Rather than HP owning and operating the intranet, it will now be owned by the Navy with HP as the operator. The Marine Corps will now own and operate the system with HP’s support.