NASA Awards Giant Workstation Contract

NASA has selected eight contractors in its $4 billion Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement III program, with GTSI Corp. coming out a big winner by being named on three of the program's contracts.

The eight companies, announced July 27, are now eligible to compete for task orders under the five-year contract to deliver workstations, servers, network equipment and software. The contract calls for appropriate peripheral equipment, network equipment, software, installation and maintenance support.

The winning SEWP III contractors are:

*Compaq Federal LLC of Reston, Va., for servers.

*Government Micro Resources Inc. of Manassas, Va., for servers and storage devices.

*GTSI Corp. of Chantilly, Va., for computer-aided design tools for electronics, networking and storage devices.

*Hewlett-Packard Co. of Santa Clara, Calif., for mechanical CAD tools and Earth science systems.

*IBM Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., for database servers.

*Logicon FDC, a division of Northrop Grumman Corp. of Los Angeles, for networking and storage devices.

*Silicon Graphics Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., for visualization tools and servers.

*Unisys Corp. of Blue Bell, Pa., for networking devices.

"We're very appreciative that NASA expanded our role by awarding us these three contracts," said Joel Lipkin, GTSI's senior vice president of marketing and customer support. "We anticipate that SEWP III will become a major vehicle for delivering storage solutions."

According to GTSI, the contract offers the lowest surcharge of any major governmentwide acquisition contract: 0.75 percent for non-NASA customers, with no surcharge for orders under $2,500 and a maximum surcharge of $5,000.