The Air Force Monday awarded six companies portions of a $960 million contract for Network-Centric Solutions-2 (NETCENTS-2) application services, according to a Defense Department statement.
Lockheed Martin [LMT], Jacobs Technology (formerly TYBRIN Corp.), Harris [HRS], SRA International, Raytheon [RTN] and L-3 [LLL] were all part of the award. The contract vehicle will provide services such as sustainment, migration, integration, training, help desk support, testing and operational support. 
An industry source said Northrop Grumman [NOC] and SAIC [SAI] were two companies who came up short for NETCENTS-2. A Northrop Grumman spokeswoman declined to comment yesterday. An email to SAIC for confirmation was not returned by press time.
Monday’s announcement was for the full and open application services pool, one of seven different NETCENTS-2 contracting vehicles. Another application services pool is set aside for small businesses. Other vehicles include enterprise information and service management (EISM) and a NETOPS and infrastructure for both a full and open competition and a small business competition.
Other services include, but are not limited to, exposing data from authoritative data sources to support web services or service oriented architecture constructs in Air Force enterprise environments. The multiple award is an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract. The award was competitively sourced and 21 offers were received, according to the Air Force. The period of performance is seven years and the ordering period is a three-year basic period with four 12-month options, if exercised.
The NETCENTS-2 contract vehicles provide the Air Force with a primary source of netcentric and information technology (IT) products, services and solutions, according to the service. Along with Monday’s contract award, the Air Force in April awarded a nearly $7 billion contract to be shared among eight companies for networking equipment, servers and storage, peripherals, multimedia, software (not included on other enterprise licenses), identity management/biometric hardware and associated software (Defense Daily, April 23).