OAO Unit Joins Pursuit of $5 Billion Outsourcing Contract

By Gail Repsher, Staff Writer


AUG. 24 ? OAO Technology Solutions Inc. of Greenbelt, Md., announced that it has joined an alliance led by Greenbelt's OAO Corp. that is chasing the. National Security Agency's outsourcing program for nonmission information technology.


The project, potentially be worth up to $5 billion over 10 years, could be awarded as early as spring 2001.


OAOT, a publicly traded company, got its start as the commercial unit for OAO and was spun out as an independent company in 1996.


"We believe our participation as a partner in this consortium makes a great deal of sense for OAOT because of our strong information technology and outsourcing skills and because of the prestige and visibility of this large, important program," said Greg Pratt, president and CEO of OAO Technology Solutions.


The NSA program, called Groundbreaker, is looking to the private sector to modernize and sustain its non-mission IT infrastructure. The team selected for the contract will provide distributed computing, enterprise and security management, network and telephony services.

OAOT can provide e-business and e-commerce integration, application service provider solutions, IT outsourcing services and network and desktop support.


Other members of the OAO Corp. alliance are WorldCom Inc. of Clinton, Miss.; Raytheon Co. of Lexington, Mass.; Coleman Research Corp. of Orlando, Fla.; ManTech International Corp. of Fairfax, Va.; Wang Government Services Inc. of McLean, Va.; and Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano, Texas.


Other teams chasing the NSA contract are led by AT&T Corp. of Basking Ridge, N.J., and Computer Sciences Corp. of El Segundo, Calif.