R eally, the Department of the Navy, you want to go through this again?!

The recompete of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) contract was arduous, took more than a year to award and deal with the protests and then it took more than 15 months to transition to the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) contract.

But like the dentist, the Navy knows it’s time start thinking about that root canal it doesn’t want, but desperately needs.

The DoN plans to release the first of two requests for information this summer for the follow-on to NGEN, which could be worth $3.5 billion over five years.

Phil Anderson, the deputy program manager for Naval Enterprise Networks Acquisition in the Navy’s Program Executive Office-Enterprise Information Systems (PEO-EIS), said they just started putting the teams together for the recompete.

“What is being communicated to us, which I think is a good thing, is to start early with the interaction with industry. You’ve been a part of efforts before where the PEO has sponsored industry days and other kinds of things, the team is looking really hard at other ways we can do that. We will do the industry days, but there are other things as well where we can reach out and get that information from you,” Anderson said at the 14th annual Naval IT Day sponsored by AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter on May 14. “My understanding — and I wasn’t a part of the NGEN competition — but there was a lot of ‘Here’s all the information the Navy has, industry you are welcome to look at it.’ Maybe you learn some things from that, maybe we learn some things. There has to be some input you have for us that we can use. We want to build contracts — could be a contract or contracts that are attractive to you all. You probably won’t see the same effort we had with NGEN on the recompete.”

In all, NGEN includes 34 services for 700,000 users across 2,500 sites.

Anderson said he expects the first RFI to be out in July, and another one to follow later in 2016.

Some of what the Navy will try to answer through the RFI process will include where the best fit is between contractor expertise and the government’s needs, should they have different contract types, should the Navy bundle services, should the Navy use the cloud and should the Navy have more flexible contract options.

Anderson said the follow-on likely will include on-shore, shipboard and pier connectivity, data center management and cloud, and expanded command and control technologies.

“The NGEN contract, we started off with a 13-month transition. We’ve been told under no circumstances will we get 13 months of transition to the vendor this time around,” he said. “As you think about your participation in this contract, your bids, your responses to the RFI, we will be looking at that as well.”

The transition from NMCI to NGEN cost the Navy an extra $20 million a month in missed savings opportunity, and it had to extend NMCI several times costing them another $1.2 billion.

The Marine Corps took a slightly different path in the transition to NGEN. Instead of the Navy model of a government-owned, contractor operated model, the Marine Corps went with a government-owned, government-operated model with contractor support.

Tom LaTurno, the enterprise data manager for Marine Corps Systems Command, said their part of the recompete will build off of its ongoing work to unify its five separate networks, integrate the secret and unclassified networks and push the Marine Corps Enterprise Network to the tactical edge.

“We do not use the NGEN contract today to buy the infrastructure. We use other methods to buy our infrastructure for our hardware, software and maintenance contracts,” LaTurno said. “So all that is potential opportunity to pull into the contract as well. All the enterprise initiatives are off the contract as well.”

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