Deadline looms for $6 billion military intelligence IT contract

The Department of Defense has finalized the solicitation for its $6 billion, five-year contract vehicle to support IT acquisition across the intelligence community.

The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity, multiple award vehicle E-SITE (Enhanced Solutions for Technology Enterprise) is vast in its scope, and primarily focuses on top-secret networks worldwide.

According to the unclassified solicitation, E-SITE spans across, hardware, software, services, support, networks, and communications and covers, "system design, development, fielding, and sustainment of global intelligence and command and control assets vital to the security of the United States." The Defense Intelligence Agency is leading the contract, which includes all the branches of the armed services and the entirety of the intelligence community as well as non-intel agencies that are IC customers.

The contract supports the planned IT modernization at the DIA. In the near term, the agency hopes to enable secure information sharing and transformed infrastructure. By the end of the contract in 2020, DIA plans to have classified intelligence data hosted on a single secured environment with mobile access for users, and the capacity to rapidly prototype and deploy apps for specific mission needs.

E-SITE is the successor to SITE (Solutions for Technology Enterprise), a $6.6 billion intel IT contract that made awards in May 2010 to 11 vendors, including heavyweights Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and SAIC. That contract expires in May 2015, around the time E-SITE is expected to announce awards.

The contract is part of a larger IT consolidation and cost-savings effort across defense and intelligence agencies, and the solicitation underscores that projects bid out under E-SITE are meant to work with the planned intelligence community cloud (ICITE) and the single-architecture Joint Information Environment (JIE) planned for the Department of Defense.

Services contemplated under E-SITE include cloud and software services, enterprise applications, unified voice and video communications, network operations and maintenance, mobile device support, web portal development, content management, a unified "one-number" help desk for all users, and R&D and testing for new and emerging technologies, including data analytics. The specifics on requirements will be contained in future, classified statements of work. Submissions from interested vendors are due in mid-May.