DOJ seeks help with telecom transition

WHAT: A Department of Justice call for help with the governmentwide telecom contract switch

WHY: DOJ wants to hear from companies who can help it move to the General Services Administration's massive Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions telecommunications contract, which will replace the current Networx contract.

DOJ said it plans to "leverage the EIS contract vehicle upon award for telecommunication services," but wants to conduct research on how it will move over to the new vehicle.

GSA officials have said the agency wants to award the contract this spring. Ahead of the contract award, GSA has been pushing agencies to plan how they will transition their current systems.

Justice wants to collect information about future solutions for enterprise voice services, as well as a roadmap to move to a modern enterprise unified communications service.

Initially, the department said, it wants to transition current legacy systems in a "like for like" arrangement to EIS, leveraging existing equipment, while building and following a roadmap to an end state of a fully developed, modern infrastructure platform based upon VoIP, IP telephony and unified communications technologies.

DOJ officials said VoIP, IPT and UC provide greater degrees of flexibility and opportunities to reduce operating costs. The agency said it envisions integrating multiple methods of communication, allowing users to connect, collaborate, and exchange information, in real-time and non-real-time, "one-to-one," "one-to-many" and "many-to-many" bi-directional communications between internal and external entities.

It said UC could be implemented as an application hosted by the contractor that supports multiple users over an IP network or as a premises-based, hosted, or hybrid solution.

The agency wants EIS-knowledgeable vendors to respond by March 9 with solution ideas, design alternatives and other recommendations that will minimize costs but improve service by March 9.

Click here to read the full RFI.