NASA launches $4.5B information technology consolidation project

NASA's Brian Dunbar says the agency transferred nearly 1.4 petabytes of data from its Web sites in 2008. Forum One via Flickr

Story updated on Dec. 8, 2009 at 11:04 a.m.

NASA kicked off a grand plan on Dec. 4 to transform the way it manages information technology by issuing the first of five contracts totaling $4.5 billion that it plans to release during the next few months.

According to procurement documents for the Web Enterprises Services and Technology contract, NASA will buy services to create, maintain and manage public Web sites, primarily the agency's main site, nasa.gov . The agency also plans to purchase other Web services, including content management, search engines, and collaborative tools such as blogs and wikis.

The WEST contract is one of five pacts that make up the Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P), which NASA will use to consolidate the IT work now performed under more than 20 contracts agencywide. Deborah Diaz, formerly deputy chief information officer at the Patent and Trademark Office, oversees I3P.

Aside from the massive amounts of data NASA transmits on its public Web sites, the WEST contract calls for plain-vanilla Web services that almost any technology company could manage, according to Vajira Ranaviraja, an analyst with INPUT Inc., a federal IT consulting firm based in Reston, Va.

Brian Dunbar, Internet services manager in the NASA public affairs office, said in a presentation in April to companies interested in the Web services contract that NASA transmitted from its Web sites nearly 1.4 petabytes of data in 2008, more than quadruple the traffic of 331 gigabytes of data it transferred in 2004.

eTouch Systems Corp. in Fremont Calif. is NASA's current Web services contractor, and David Valliere, eTouch's federal program manager, said the company plans to bid on the new contract and already meets WEST's requirements.

The contract is valued at $80 million, the smallest of the five consolidated contracts, and is a small business set-aside, Ranaviraja said.

The two largest pacts in the I3P program are the $2.5 billion Agency Consolidated End-User Services Contract, from which NASA will buy desktops, cell phones and agencywide e-mail systems, and the $1.5 billion NASA Enterprise Data Center contract for data centers and storage. NASA said it will release requests for proposals for these contracts next year.

The agency said it plans to release the procurement for a consolidated agencywide networks contract, which includes a long-haul network and local area networks, on Dec. 11. A week later, NASA plans to kick off its enterprise applications contract. Both pacts are values at $100 million each, Ranaviraja said.

Correction

NASA actually transmitted nearly 1.4 petabytes of data from its Web sites in 2008.