Navy sets new timetable for NGEN awards

The Navy has pushed back the expected award dates for its Next Generation Enterprise Network recompete.

Known as NGEN, the contract is for the Navy’s IT infrastructure and is expected to be worth about $3.5 billion. DXC Technologies is the incumbent through the HPE Enterprise Services-CSC merger. HPE’s legacy with the contract goes back to 2001 when EDS Corp. won the original Navy-Marine Corps Intranet contract. Then HP bought EDS and later split into two companies, one of them HPE.

DXC is expected to bid as a prime but others in the hunt apparently include CSRA and Leidos.

Instead of a single contract this time, the Navy is planning two awards. One is for hardware and the second is for services, integration and transport.

The Navy had expected to name winners in June 2018 but said today that it will award the hardware contract in November 2018 with the services award to come in December.

The hardware contract is being called End User Hardware or EUHW and includes hardware as a service as well as hardware purchases. The services contract is known as the Service Management, Integration and Transport contract or SMIT. It includes print services, software core build services, service desk and network defense.

The Navy said it was extending the time table to allow it to use a new “sprint” contract development process. The service will be holding weekly conference calls with industry as well as one-on-one industry Q&A sessions. An engineering day also is in the works.

“The increased Industry interaction encourages and promotes industry input early on in the process to develop better acquisition documents for government and industry alike,” the Navy said in its announcement.