NRO awards Harris communications work

The National Reconnaissance Office has chosen Harris Corp. to provide operations, maintenance and support services for the agency's global communications and information systems, the company announced today.

NRO, which is part of the 14-agency intelligence community, designs, builds and operates the nation's reconnaissance satellites, providing the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Department and other federal agencies with information.

Under the terms of the contract, Harris Technical Services Corp. will provide communications and IT services at NRO locations worldwide. The contract has a base period of three years, with three option years and four award-term years, and a potential value of $1 billion over the potential 10-year life.

The Patriot program, as NRO has dubbed it, is consolidating 10 or more existing contracts into one vehicle, said Bruce Buckley, Patriot program manager for HTSC. "The contract start date is the first of September, and there will be a 60- to 90-day transition period" from the current contracts, he said.

HTSC will provide a wide range of operations and maintenance services for the agency's communications and IT infrastructure, Buckley said.

"For LANs and WANs, we'll be doing physical maintenance for routers, switches [and] PBXes, for instance, installation and removal of equipment, including desktop support, installation of software for desktops and servers," he said. The company also will provide a "full-service desk," which goes beyond the traditional help desk, Buckley said, to handle not only incidents but all customer service requests.

Harris, of Melbourne, Fla., will have a central headquarters facility for the program in the Chantilly, Va., area with a couple of hundred employees. In addition, the company will have local staff at NRO facilities worldwide to handle onsite services.

HTSC's major teammates include Raytheon Co., Waltham, Mass.; AT&T Corp., Bedminster, N.J.; and CACI International Inc., Arlington, Va.