Northrop Grumman Cobham Intercoms LLC (NGCI), a company formed by Northrop Grumman [NOC] and Cobham [COB], yesterday announced the reinstatement of work under the Vehicular Intercommunication System Expanded (VIS-X) contract for the Army.
VIS-X will provide vehicle crewmembers and occupants with improved speech intelligibility and hearing protection.
This summer, NGCI was selected over teams led by Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Rockwell Collins [COL] for the 10-year, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contract valued at a potential $2.4 billion contract issued by the Army’s Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM) (Defense Daily, July 2).
After the U.S. Army CECOM’s initial award announcement, Telephonics Corp., a losing bidder, filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO Oct. 16 denied the protest and the contract will now move forward with NGCI as the selected supplier.
Under the terms of contract originally awarded in June 2009 by the Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM) Contracting Center, the NGCI team is required to be able to deliver up to 500 VIS-X systems per month during the first year following completion of First Article Testing and up to 2,000 systems per month in subsequent years.
The work done under the contract will be managed by the Assistant Project Manager, Vehicular Intercom Systems (APM VIS), which is part of the Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems (Team DCATS) Project Office of the Program Executive Office, Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS).
In addition to improved speech intelligibility and hearing protection, VIS-X will provide vehicle crew members and occupants with increased command and control of the on-board and external communication assets, connection to future Internet Protocol (IP)-based digital communications networks, VoIP services, and an increased number of user interfaces for use by crew and next generation IP radios. VIS-X can be used in both new production and legacy vehicle platforms, allowing the warfighter to utilize the same state-of-the-art equipment regardless of vehicle type or age.