By Geoff Fein

The Navy has awarded General Dynamics [GD], Lockheed Martin [LMT] and SAIC [SAI] a $408 million indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity multiple award contract (IDIQ MAC) for Common Afloat Local Area Network Infrastructure (CALI).

The CALI contracts are used to procure shipboard network infrastructure and related engineering support services, mainly in the areas of production, engineering, and common computing environment components, according to the award.

Presently, the Navy buys many of the variants they use for their networking hardware under the Q-70 contract, John Nikolai, Lockheed Martin director of communications and workstations for undersea systems, told Defense Daily yesterday.

Q-70 is the contract Lockheed Martin has with Team Submarine to provide them, the surface fleet and the command, control, computers, communication and intelligence (C4I) community with racks, servers and displays, he added.

“That contract the ordering period was supposed to come to an end this July. The contract has since been extended by one year,” Nikolai said. “But the C4I customer needed a way to procure the hardware they need and in this area to procure the hardware and services to sustain the legacy systems until CANES comes on board.”

Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman [NOC] were both awarded contracts from the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego, to continue developing CANES, or the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (Defense Daily, March 5).

CALI will enable the Navy to continue to support legacy systems until CANES is underway, Nikolai said.

Lockheed Martin submitted its bid for CALI approximately 51 weeks ago, he added. Eight companies had submitted bids for CALI. In the end, the Navy chose Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and SAIC.

The CALI contract is expected to be officially awarded June 1, Nikolai noted. “[The Navy] established a ceiling for the basic contract of $408 million.”

That means the Navy can offer an award up to that amount, or less than $408 million, Nikolai said. Additionally, contracts will by done by individual task order, he added.

The three winning companies will be competing to provide the Navy the best price and schedule for shipboard network systems.

“So the IDIQ MAC says they are going to compete these individual task orders. We will have the opportunity to compete for the work and to keep the work at Lockheed Martin,” Nikolai said.

“This contract is to sustain their infrastructure until CANES is in full deployment,” he added. “CANES is designed to consolidate the networks, to provide the cross domain solution and establish a common computing environment across all their platforms.”

Under the CALI contract, the Navy will buy new equipment, additional quantities of systems, like they do today under the Q-70 contract, Nikolai said.

“In the RFP, they identified what they thought the requirements were going to be over the life of the contract,” he said.

Nikolai acknowledges the requirements could change, but the Navy gave the three winners an estimate of the anticipated work, so the companies have a pretty good idea of what the service plans to do year by year.

The companies have been told by the contracting office that they probably won’t see the first task order to bid on for a month or two, Nikolai said.

The Navy does have an option to keep the CALI contract in effect until 2018, he said. But the dollar value of what the Navy is going to buy in those out years is going to be low, Nikolai added.

CANES comes online well before 2017, he said.

“Just like the Navy gave themselves a lot of ceiling (on the potential dollar award), they gave themselves a lot of schedule. So they will have the ability to keep themselves in a sustainment mode for as long as the need to,” Nikolai added.