NASA has awarded the first of five contracts under its major IT infrastructure programs.

Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) received a $321.2 million contract to operate and maintain NASA’s enterprise application systems under the Enterprise Applications Service Technologies (EAST) contract, the agency announced Thursday.

SAIC will support all 10 NASA field centers, headquarters in Washington and the shared services center in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

The five-year contract is a follow-on to the Unified NASA Information Technology Services (UNITS) contract. It will be managed by Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

NASA issued the request for proposals Jan. 6 for EAST as part of its effort to entirely revamp the way it manages its technology hardware and software.

The space agency is reviewing three other RFPs and is expected to issue a fifth solicitation for its enterprise data center sometime this fall or early winter.

Linda Cureton, NASA’s chief information officer, said in a September interview with Federal News Radio that cloud computing is changing the notion of what a data center is.

She said NASA is looking for the best strategy for them and it could be a combination of things, including cloud and non-cloud options.

Deborah Diaz, NASA’s deputy chief information officers, said this is the largest IT consolidation effort the agency has ever gone through.

“Each of the I3P areas will be rolled out in phases starting in 2011 so the impact doesn’t hit NASA all at once,” Diaz said. “For the Enterprise Service Desk, you will start seeing impacts in the fall and you will see changes as early as 2011. For Web Enterprise Services Technology, you will see changes in early 2011. For the NASA Integrated Communications Services will be coming in the spring of 2011. ACES, which is the agency consolidated end user services, is also planned for the summer of 2011.”

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