Agriculture picks vendors for IRM work

Eleven contractors will compete head-to-head for task orders from the Department of Agriculture on its Information Resource Management Software Support Services II contract.


The department selected the vendors for the five-year, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract Nov. 20. The combined award ceilings for the 11 companies total almost $2 billion, but the predecessor contract with six contractors generated about $214 million over five years, and the new contract is not expected to greatly exceed that amount.


Under the terms of the contract, the vendors will compete to provide a range of information resource management developmental and information technology support services to several elements within the Agriculture Department and some of its agencies.


Dale Luddeke, vice president for resource and environmental services at Computer Sciences Corp., one of the winning contractors, said the contract has three functional areas:


*Providing information solutions and services, such as software development, software conversion and configuration management;


*Telecommunications and hardware, such as network administration;


*Administrative and infrastructure requirements, including data modeling, warehousing, help-desk services and disaster recovery.


Luddeke said the department has not yet released any task orders on which the selected vendors may bid. Instead, the Agriculture Department has made extensions to a number of prospective task orders to give customer agencies time to make revisions.


"Most of this job will be assessing what they're doing and what their real issues are," Luddeke said. "They have budgetary issues like everybody else, [and they're] trying to figure out how to do the most with their resources .... We're very interested in and inspired by the opportunity to help them."


The awardees and their contract ceilings are:


Northrop Grumman Corp., $231.8 million

Computer Sciences Corp., $189.0 million

Electronic Data Systems Corp., $155.7 million

Unisys Corp., $198.9 million

IBM Corp., $190.6 million

TRW Inc., $195.2 million

OAO Corp. (now part of Lockheed Martin Corp.), $158.3 million

Rose International , $178 million

N-Link Corp., $204.4 million

Science Applications International Corp., $174.1 million

National Systems & Research, $100.4 million