NMCI reaches key milestone

The Navy has reached another milestone in its effort to create an enterprise network across more than 400,000 shore-based seats: Rolling out the first 20,000 seats.

The mark is important because it signifies the official start of the monitoring of service-level agreements that are an integral part of the Navy's $6.9 billion contract with EDS. NMCI is a service contract that lists a number of service level agreements (SLAs). EDS gets paid based on how well it meets those SLAs.

Under an agreement with Pentagon officials, EDS and the Navy must review the SLAs for a month and provide a report to John Stenbit, Defense Department chief information officer, and Michael Wynne, deputy undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and technology, about how that process is going, said Bill Richard, EDS' NMCI enterprise client executive.

If DOD officials give their approval, the Navy would be allowed to order as many as 310,000 seats, significantly more than half of the 400,000 seats covered under the NMCI contract.

Richard, in an Aug. 14 briefing with reporters, said that EDS passed the 20,000-seat point by Aug. 9. Therefore, the Navy and EDS must submit the report to the Pentagon by mid-September.

EDS has an extensive system designed to monitor the contract SLAs. DOD officials wanted some assurances that the system would accurately monitor the service levels.

The issues raised in the SLA numbers so far are primarily related to help-desk issues, Richard said. That is typical in this kind of rollout. Many help-desk calls are about forgotten passwords, he said.

EDS will continue rolling out seats as the company monitors SLAs, Richard said.