The Navy on Thursday said it intends to issue a sole source solicitation to Perspecta for another half-year contract extension of the legacy Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) contract.

In a FedBizOpps notice, the Navy said the extension will provide continuation of services Perspecta currently provides for six more months of end-user hardware (EUHW), lasting from October 2019 to March 2020, and four to seven months of network services, lasting from June 2020 to September or December 2020.

This adds to the current 23 months of extensions the Navy previously awarded, which consists of a three-month extension in option period four, a single one-year option period, and another eight-month option period.

Last September, the Navy awarded Perspecta a $787 million NGEN extension to last through September 2019. Without the extension, the contract would have expired at the end of September 2018 (Defense Daily, Sept. 6, 2018).

NGEN is the Navy’s enterprise-wide information technology (IT) services contract vehicle, providing IT services to the Navy and Marine Corps. This includes the Navy Marine Corps Internet (NMCI) and the Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN) within the continental U.S. (CONUS).

The Navy has been conducting a competition for the NGEN Re-compete (NGEN-R) between Perspecta and Leidos [LDOS] since 2018 (Defense Daily, Feb. 5, 2018).

Under NGEN-R, the Navy plans to add IT coverage outside CONUS through the OCONUS Navy Enterprise Network (ONE-Net), and also split the work into two contracts consisting of EUHW and service management, integration and transport (SMIT). The Navy hopes this new setup will lower total NGEN costs.

The new notice said the Navy expects to award the EUHW NGEN-R contract in the fourth quarter of FY 2019 and SMIT in the second quarter of FY 2020.

Perspecta is the incumbent on NGEN and provides the IT 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 mid-2018 as a merger of DXC’s U.S. public sector business, Vencore, and Keypoint Govenrment Solutions (Defense Daily, March 9, 2018).