By Geoff Fein
Virginia Beach-based Global Technical Systems (GTS) has been awarded a $95 million indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract for the Navy’s Common Processing Systems (CPS)–a major piece of the Navy’s Open Architecture (OA) efforts.
“It’s really a compilation of what we have been working towards for the past 12 years, standing behind OA…the idea that this is basically a follow-on to the Navy processing capability,” Terry Spitzer, chief executive officer, told Defense Daily yesterday.
“The fact a small company was able to win this is just huge, huge for us, huge for OA,” he added.
Since awarding the CPS contract in March to GTS and its partners, DRS Technologies [DRS] and Northrop Grumman [NOC], Virginia-based Argon ST, Inc., [STST] has protested the decision, first to the Navy and then to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in May.
The Navy had issued a stop work order while it considered Argon ST’s protest. However, the order was lifted on May 1. A stop work order was not issued when Argon ST took its protest to GAO.
“The Navy has not issued a second stop work order in response to Argon ST, Inc’s. protest before GAO. The protest was filed after GAO’s deadline to obtain a required stay in performance,” a Naval Sea Systems Command spokeswoman told Defense Daily earlier this week.
The CPS contract provides for the design, development, qualification, and production of a COTS-based, Grade A shock-qualified, processing system in support of Navy platforms. Efforts may include development of logistics support products, spares, and support services. The CPS equipment procurement provides a processing system that supports the Navy’s planned implementation of OA for Navy combat systems. The CPS will be designed around commercially available hardware and software and will provide computer processing and memory, data storage and extraction and I/O interfaces to support host software applications of Navy combat systems. The CPS will meet the computing requirements of other programs of record, including Aegis modernization (Defense Daily, April 13).
“We were further aided in our proposal by IBM, with whom we developed a strategic relationship to leverage their IBM Blade Center infrastructure,” Spitzer said is a statement. “This is the same technology that is being used in the Aegis Weapon System, DDG-1000 Total Shipboard Computing Environment (TSCE) program, and the Integrated Shipboard Network System (ISNS) program.”