Army extends Northrop deal

The Army today awarded a $101 million contract to Northrop Grumman Corp. for information technology equipment and management services in support of the Personnel Electronic Records Management program.

Northrop Grumman's IT division, located in Herndon, Va., will provide application development, customer support, enterprise architecture and planning, information assurance and information systems security, according to a March 11 company statement.

Northrop Grumman has worked on PERMs for the past five years. The new five-year deal is a follow-on contract and the company will work on it with Science Applications International Corp., located in San Diego, the statement said.

"Due to our knowledge of the current system, any risk migrating from a legacy system to a new modernized electronic records management system is reduced," said Kent Schneider, president of Northrop Grumman IT division's Defense Enterprise Solutions group, in the statement.

PERMs archives about 140 million record pages and holds them for at least five years after soldiers leave the Army. The system uses records management, storage and Web technologies to improve service, reduce cost and save time, the statement said.