Army moves forward with $1B cyber training contract
By
Nick Wakeman
The Army is developing a contract to for cyber training that could be worth $1 billion to a single winner.
The Army is developing a contract for cyber training that could be worth nearly $1 billion to a single winner.
The next iteration of the Persistent Cyber Training Environment will be called Cyber Trident and has been under development since late 2018
The Army wants to take an enterprise approach to this training and wants to leverage the investment it has made in the Persistent Cyber Training Environment to date. Cyber Trident will be collaborative platform for developing training.
At a recent industry day, the Army emphasized that this will not be a contract about FTEs (full-time equivalents). It will use an Agile development framework to quickly meet its needs.
A large number of organizations will use the contract including the Army program executive offices, the service cyber commands, the Joint Cyber Command.
The contract is expected to be worth $957 million eight years. Services will include cyber training content and licensing, training event operations, training solutions, and training systems architecture.
There also will be a focus on systems integration, which will include Agile DevOps, third-party orchestration and integration, the hardware and software infrastructure, the platform architecture and test and development.
Right now the Army has several contracts providing these kinds of services, some of those primes include Accenture, ECS Federal, Colsa Corp., SAIC, and Dell. The Army also has had cyber innovation challenges in place involving ManTech, By Light, and SimSpace.
Because of the classified nature of much of the work, the Army will vet all potential bidders before giving them any technical data packages. Bidders will need Top Secret Facility Clearance level and Top Secret storage. Personnel will need security clearances as well.
A draft solicitation is the fourth quarter of government fiscal 2019 and a final RFP in the first quarter of fiscal 2020. An award is expected by first quarter fiscal 2021.