State hires SAIC under $2.5B IT services deal

Technology

State hires SAIC under $2.5B IT services deal

The company will provide engineering, security and operations and maintenance services under the Vanguard program. The 10-year contract is one piece of a larger...

Federal News Network Staff

December 23, 2010 4:45 pm

1 min read

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
Federal News Radio

The State Department awarded SAIC a $2.5 billion contract for a host of IT services.

State announced the award, called Vanguard 2.2.1, Wednesday in a notice on FedBizOpps.gov.

SAIC will provide engineering and design services, security and operation and maintenance services for the critical IT infrastructures under a performance-based indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with a 10-year period of performance.

Ken Rogers, the director of State’s Strategic Planning Office within the Bureau of Information Resource Management, said in an e-mail statement that Vanguard II will help the agency meet its goal in the fiscal 2011 to 2013 IT strategic plan.

Rogers said the Vanguard II contract will assist State by:

Streamlining its IT acquisitions;
Utilizing performance-based contracting;
Centralizing program management;
Increasing accountability and transparency;
Leveraging emerging technologies, such as cloud computing to create operational efficiencies and cost savings.

SAIC would not comment on the award.

On SAIC’s website for the State Department’s Vanguard II program, the company states the request for proposals focuses one major area of the agency’s six-part consolidation program.

Under Vanguard, State is looking for support for its servers, mainframes, network devices, network perimeter, anti-virus engineering, public key infrastructure (PKI), biometrics and encryption, monitoring tools, telephony, mobile computing platform, virtual environment and enclave design/security engineering.

Susan Swart, State’s chief information officer, said during a recent interview with Federal New Radio, that the agency is about to finish another IT consolidation effort around the desktop. This is a domestic program to consolidate 28 different entities which were running on different local area networks. She said about 80 percent of all desktops are consolidated under one service support model, which includes help desk and software upgrades.