McDonald Bradley joins EPA ITS-ESE team

Environmental Protection Agency

Lockheed Martin Corp. selected a Herndon, Va., company to provide information technology solutions as a subcontractor to an Environmental Protection Agency program valued at nearly $700 million.

McDonald Bradley Inc. will be part of the EPA Information Technology Solutions - Environmental Systems Engineering (ITS-ESE) project. The company will provide advanced Extensible Markup Language development capabilities, data visualization support and semantic Web technology that lets users conduct searches across databases that might normally be incompatible. The technology will also allow EPA officials to perform larger and more efficient data searches across multiple databases at the same time.

"It is a very nice technical fit for us as a teammate," said Ken Bartee, president and chief executive officer of McDonald Bradley. "These areas were very important to the EPA because of the amount of data that will be involved."

A main goal of this program is to align the environmental information systems of the EPA with the enterprise architectures of federal and state partners, according to EPA officials.

Specific task orders on the project have not yet been granted, but the planning process will begin within the next few weeks, Bartee said.

"The EPA is really embracing XML technologies," he said. "I do believe they are going down the right road with both XML and Java-based solutions."

The ITS-ESE contract -- granted to Lockheed Jan. 8 -- is significant not only for its high dollar value, but also for being a performance-based award.

"I think the federal government is still coming to grips with what [performance-based contracting] means, but the EPA has really embraced this," Bartee said.

The contract calls for the establishment of a National Environmental Information and Systems Engineering Center in Arlington, Va., to serve as headquarters for the program. It also involves systems application security, IT architecture support, data management, statistical services, geographic information systems, high-performance computing and visualization, scientific application, and computational scientific support.

McDonald Bradley has provided visualization and semantic Web technology to other federal partners, including the Defense Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.