NetCents gets $700M boost
By
Nick Wakeman
The Air Force adds more ceiling space to the $9 billion NetCents contract.
The Air Force wants to add $700 million to the ceiling of the soon to expire NetCents contract for IT services.
The extra ceiling space is needed because of the risk of NetCents running out of ceiling before its follow-on, NetCents II is awarded and up and running.
“Without this ceiling increase, solutions being implemented may result in non-standards based contracts and conflict with [Air Force and Defense Department] vision and policy for standard, secure and interoperable architectures across the various mission areas,” the Air Force said in its Notice of Intent.
The contract originally had a ceiling of $9 billion but as of March 2012, $8.7 billion had been ordered against that ceiling. The Air Force expects another $1 billion to be ordered against the contract. The contract’s expiration date was extended earlier from Sept. 10, 2011, to Sept. 10, 2012.
The expectation is that NetCents II will be awarded before the new expiration date.
The existing NetCents contractors are the Centech Group, Harris Corp., Northrop Grumman, NCI Inc., Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Telos Corp.
The NetCents contract is used by the Air Force to manage its IT portfolio and to make sure its IT investments adhere to standards of the Global Information Grid, ConstellationNet, Infostructure Technology Reference Model, Joint Technical Architecture (now the DoD Information Technology Standards and Profile Registry (DISR) Online), and other Defense Department technical architecture standards.