Uni-Comm Competition
AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND CONTRACT SEEKS BALANCE BETWEEN MANAGEMENT REQUIREMENTS AND TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES.
The Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) is in the process of putting together a highly anticipated solicitation that would provide managed network services to its 40,000 computer users across geographically disparate sites. In the process, Space Command also is generating excitement among the military services that it has found a way to strike a balance between contract management requirements and rapid technological advances.
The AFSPC solicitation, known as Unified Communications, or Uni- Comm, has been in development for several years. AFSPC issued a draft statement of work in October 2005, anticipating that the operations and maintenance (O&M) contract would commence on October 1, 2007. AFSPC released the most recent draft statement of work in October 2006, but announced this past January that it would release another draft in spring, with a final solicitation due by the end of summer.
The memo asserted that the Uni-Comm contract would likely be a fixed-price incentive firm target contract arrangement, with additional performance incentives for specific performance targets.
“The government is planning a period of performance for this contract of one year for the basic contract period with seven one-year options that may be exercised to extend performance,” the memo added. “The contract length information has not changed. However, the O&M support is now currently planned to start” in October 2008.
As originally envisioned, the Uni-Comm contract would encompass core communications services for AFSPC. Contract tasks would include O&M and management of the AFSPC enterprise data networks, NIPRNet and SIPRNetET; O&M and management of AFSPC enterprise voice networks, the Defense Switched Network and Defense Red Switch Network within AFSPC locations; O&M and management of AFSPC Land Mobile Radio Systems and video teleconference systems; AFSPC technical control facilities for AFSPC enterprises, and government-owned communications cable plant; and technical support, documentation and training services.
AFSPC declined to comment on the status of the solicitation, which will be released through a password-protected procurement Website, Federal Technical Data Solutions, located at https://www.fedteds.gov.
Large and small businesses alike have voiced interest in serving as prime contractor for Uni-Comm. Most recently, EDS, Verizon and Northrop Grumman announced their intent to compete for the contract at AFCEA Spacecomm 2007 in Colorado Springs, Colo., last January.
SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
Military agencies are very interested in how Uni-Comm will turn out to see if it is worthwhile setting up similar contracts for their own enterprises, said Robert Cunningham, executive director for advanced programs in the EDS Government Solutions Group.
“The Air Force has chosen to do it command by command as a stepping stone, as opposed to the Navy, where they said we are going to do it as an entire naval forces issue in one leap,” Cunningham noted.
EDS holds the contract for the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI). But the AFSCP approach would enable the Air Force to replicate the contract incrementally, Cunningham explained, while the one-year contract periods would enable individual commands to make significant changes based on technological innovations if need be.
“That gives them ultimate control from year to year on how this is going. They have a good understanding there. It also allows this contract to evolve with the reality of technological change,” he stated.
The scope of the contract could also change. AFSCP intends to roll Uni-Comm out to all of its sites in one year to cover their everyday communications networks.
“In the future, upon success, they hope to add more of their mission-oriented networks into this capability as well,” Cunningham remarked. “The ability to do that at an enterprise level is gaining technologically and security concerns are more easily addressed and so forth.”
Department of Defense enterprise mandates and rapidly evolving technology— examples of which are compliance with Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 and the introduction of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)—have made command and control across AFSPC sites somewhat messy. Streamlining separate site contracts into one managed-services contract would reduce that management burden significantly, Cunningham added.
“They have eight major sites, and some of those sites also have non-colocated units with them,” he said. “So it adds up to 18 or 19 sites in total, but eight major sites. To do this same job across those sites now takes 22 different contracts. For no other reason, every time they have a technological evolution that starts to broaden their scope or they need to change the requirement based on mission changes, they have the impact of having to adjust 22 different contracts or at least the threat of that.
“They also have to execute daily security issues, and they have no centralized command and control because they are dealing with 22 different contractors on 22 different contracts just to take care of eight sites and 10 minor sites that are not colocated,” he continued. “It’s just a nightmare contractually as well as for network operations.”
EDS has already announced its initial contract team for its Uni-Comm bid. EDS would serve as the prime systems integrator, with information architecture and security support from AT&T. Subcontractors include RSIS and ManTech, which would provide communications operations and management services, as would ITT, which also would provide transformational architectures support.
EDS has proven that it can manage these sorts of problems across an entire enterprise, Cunningham declared, pointing to NMCI.
“We are very adept and practiced at doing this type of enterprise consolidation across government and also across the military,” he elaborated. “The NMCI is a good example of that. For the Navy, it’s the entire naval forces, both Navy and Marines, on a worldwide basis. With the U.K., we have a similar situation for the entire Ministry of Defence on a worldwide basis.
“We know how to do this. This is what we do,” Cunningham asserted. “We don’t make airplanes. We don’t build ships. This is what we do.”
DOWNSIZING IMPACT
Verizon Federal sees itself as having perfected services across a global enterprise, providing it with a great deal of insight into how to do the same for its customers, according to Marlin Forbes, regional vice president for defense and international services.
“This sort of coming in and doing operations and maintenance and management of systems is one of the fastest growing areas of our business,” Forbes reported. “Right now, we have almost 4,000 managed customers that have the same sort of complexity and requirements that the Air Force is looking for. So we have a good past performance and a solid track record in that regard.”
Forbes estimated that current Air Force downsizing plans call for the elimination of 18,000 to 20,000 information technology jobs inside of the service, prompting the need to outsource more networks but also raising the stakes to ensure they are properly managed. The Air Force Training Command recently released a request for information very similar in nature to the concept of the Uni-Comm solicitation, Forbes noted, signaling that other Air Force commands are preparing to deal with factors like the IT downsizing.
“We think that the partnership between government and commercial carriers is the right sort of business proposition now,” Forbes argued. “I’m not a butt-and-seat provider. That’s not my solution to a customer’s problems. My solution is really taking best commercial practices, best industry practices, and best technology that we spend billions of dollars investing in, and then putting that together in a way that really optimizes what the customer is looking for and give them a very serious outsourced architecture focused on bottom- line requirements and also address the total cost of ownership of a network.
“We can typically go in and take over someone’s network and bring it in-house and deliver comparable or better services for significantly less for what they had been paying previously,” he said. “It really hits our sweet spot.”
Verizon Federal executives also feel their position is boosted by their recent win on the General Services Administration’s Networx Universal, under which they and Qwest Communications and AT&T will be able to receive task orders to overhaul the federal telecommunications network.
“The whole nature of technology is blurring what used to be lines that were very separate. With the integrators in the past, Layer 7 of the ISO stack, the application layer, was pretty much their domain. Now what we are seeing is more common usage systems that are embedded in a network and our customers actually go out there and use them on a fee-for-usage kind of basis,” Forbes said.
Forbes pointed to the Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) model employed by the Defense Information Systems Agency as an example of best practices from commercial industry making their way into defense systems. The agency reaps significant savings on both software and enterprise management by providing NCES information-sharing capabilities.
“It’s really taking those service-oriented architecture things that we have already done and begin to offer those to customers as a way of being able to visualize your costs, understanding exactly what is going on with your network and then making the sort of trades that you might be able to make within infrastructure to get more security and then have that security embedded in the network as well,” Forbes said. ♦
