| EDS Wins $9 Billion Navy Computer Contract | |
|
The US Navy last week named Electronic Data Systems (EDS) as the winner of its five to eight-year computer services contract worth up to $9 billion -- the largest information technology contract ever awarded by the federal government.
Under
the contract, EDS will build
and maintain a department-wide Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). The NMCI will
make the naval service more efficient, more productive and enhance its readiness
by providing data, video and voice communications to link shore units and
interface with the "Information Technology for the 21st Century"
(IT-21) initiative and the Marine Corps Tactical Network (MCTN). Officials
of EDS estimate that at least 400,000 new desktop computers and networking
hardware worth tens of millions of dollars will be needed in just the initial
stages of the massive project. According
to Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, costs during the first five years of the
contract should amount to about $1.2 billion a year and $1 billion a year over
the next 3 optional years. The
successful base bid submitted by EDS was $6,938,817,954 for the initial five
years of the contract. Original
Navy estimates placed the cost of the project at up to $16 billion, but rapidly
falling prices in the computer industry during some 18 months of contract
preparation and bidding resulted in savings of more than $7 billion. According
to Navy specifications, EDS will be required to subcontract at least 35 percent
of the work to small businesses, with incentives to use even higher percentage. Other
bidders on the Navy job included International Business Machines Corp (IBM),
Computer Sciences Corp, and General Dynamics. Over
the next 20 years, the Pentagon hopes to combine all of its huge collection
of combat and intelligence gathering networks into an integrated network it
calls a Global Information Grid or GIG. In
a Sept. 6 speech, Art Money, the Pentagon chief information officer outlined
plans for the GIG to provide "a
seamless, secure, end-to-end environment for both war-fighting and business
applications."
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