TASER Awarded: The NGA ASP/ISP Transition Contract

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded the Total Application Services for Enterprise Requirements (TASER) contract to:

• Accenture National Security Services, LLC
• BAE Systems Information Technology, Inc.
• The Boeing Company-Autometric, Inc.
• Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc.
• Computer Services Corporation Enforcement, Security & Intelligence Group
• Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.
• General Dynamics One Source
• Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Services
• NJVC, LLC
• Northrop Grumman, Inc.
• OG Systems, Inc.
• QVine Corporation
• Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems; and
• Science Application International Corporation.

TASER will be used to obtain engineering services across multiple functional categories including: engineering and trade studies; pilots and prototypes; integration and deployment; and application sustainment. When the RFP was released, NGA stated that TASER was part of its transition to an Application Service Provider/Infrastructure Service Provider (ASP/ISP) model. The agency also said that it was seeking innovative industry approaches for realization of cost savings in the area of application services.

One year ago in an Information Week interview with John Foley, I talked about how GeoEye was using Appistry's cloud platform, in lieu of its own data center, to host NGA applications. Although that was a pilot effort, some see TASER as an ideal vehicle for NGA to realize it's vision of establishing a GEOINT distributed computing cloud.

Just last week, DigitalGlobe announced that it has signed a contract to modify its service level agreement with NGA. The original option, if exercised, provided for a single nine-month extension of the term from April 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010. The modified option grants NGA the option to extend the SLA for three months on the same terms, from April 1, 2010 to June 30, 2010 with six additional options, each for a one-month period, with the last option term expiring on December 31, 2010. This web-services solution is clearly using cloud computing techniques.

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )