The Department of the Navy will not award a contract next month for its Next Generation Enterprise Network as planned.
Navy officials had originally planned to award one or two contracts by Feb. 12 to develop the massive private network, known as NGEN, but the award date has been pushed back to May 2013.
“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, spokesman for the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems, said in a statement.
Three companies have already announced their intent to bid on the NGEN contract: HP; Computer Sciences Corp.; and its partner, Harris Corp.
So far, the continuing resolution and looming threat of automatic sequestration budget cuts have not impacted NGEN’s contract award schedule, the Navy said Thursday. But that could change in the future.
NGEN will replace the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), a contractor-owned network serving more than 700,000 Navy and Marine Corps personnel.
3 Comments
I hope the Navy learns from the USAF debacle that was ECSS and summarily disqualifies Computer Sciences Corp from consideration.
That billion dollar bungle did not result in a single civilian being fired nor a senior military officer being court-martialed.
I hope the Navy learns that lesson as well. Accountability from the program managers, be they military or civilian better be a paramount concern on an effort such as this.
I’m a retired Marine and current federal civil servant required to maintain a security clearance. Saying that, it still boggles the mind to think that the DOD has not converted it’s entire network to Linux and dumped the most insecure operating system of all times (Microsoft Windows). Is DOD or as far as that goes, the federal government afraid that Linux OS’s are too secure?
It might interest the powers that be that even Microsoft Corp in Redmond run Linux servers for some of their critical domains. Ten years it ago it was near 20% of their servers feeding the internet using Linux kernel servers.