The Navy awarded Perspecta a $787 million contract on Wednesday to extend the current Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) contract for another year through September 2019.
As the incumbent, Perspecta provides the Navy NGEN services through its U.S. public sector business it inherited from DXC Technology [DXC], which itself took Hewlett Packard’s [HP] Enterprise Services business. Perspecta launched in May as a merger of DXC’s U.S. public sector business, Vencore and Keypoint Government Solutions (Defense Daily, March 9).
The new contract, issued by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, will extend the ordering period from Oct. 1 of this year through Sept. 30, 2019. This was a sole-source acquisition and thus was not competitively procured. Without this award, NGEN was set to expire at the end of the month.
Ruth Youngs Lew, Program Executive Officer for Enterprise Information Systems for the Navy, said in a statement that the award is coming with an expected eight-month option period.
NGEN is the Navy’s enterprise-wide information technology (IT) services contract vehicle. It provides IT service for the Navy and Marine Corps inside the continental U.S. (CONUS) through the Navy Marine Corps Internet (NMCI) and the Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN).
The Navy is currently conducting a competition between Leidos [LDOS] and Perspecta for the Navy’s NGEN Re-compete (NGEN-R) contract (Defense Daily, Feb. 5).
In NGEN-R, the Navy plans to add IT coverage outside CONUS in the OCONUS Navy Enterprise Network (ONE-Net) and also split the work into two contracts –end user hardware (EUHW) and service management, integration and transport (SMIT). The Navy said it expects this arrangement to drive down the total NGEN costs.
NGEN was first set to expire in June, but last year the Navy moved the award back to this September. That decision extended the existing SMIT by up to 23 months and the EUHW by up to 39 months total (Defense Daily, Sept. 20).
However, now it is being extended another full year. The Naval Enterprise Networks program manager, Capt. Ben McNeal, said in a statement Wednesday that the NGEN extension, called NGEN-X, “is an anticipated and necessary step that ensures the continuation of network and computing services while the Next Generation Enterprise Network contract Re-compete (NGEN-R) family of contracts are procured.”
Perspecta said this extension will provide uninterrupted IT operations until the NGEN-R contracts are awarded and begin work.
In July the Navy announced its intent to release a request for proposals (RFP) for the EUHW and SMIT NGEN-R contracts, but the service has not released any notices yet.
“We are in the process of finalizing the RFP documents for release in the near future,” McNeal added.