Army follows cadets into ITES

The U.S. Military Academy will be the first Army installation to use the service's new performance-based procurement program.

West Point officials are turning to the Information Technology Enterprise Solutions (ITES) contract to update computer operating systems to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 and Active Directory.

On March 12, the Army signed a six-month, $175,000 task order with Northrop Grumman Corp. so the academy can meet the service's Dec. 31 goal to remove Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 or older operating systems from all of its computers, said Steve Miller, ITES product leader, during a March 17 interview.

West Point's computer operating system update does not follow the performance-based focus of ITES: asking vendors to solve an IT problem, letting them submit their own solutions and then choosing the best one. But military and government agencies can use $1 billion IT equipment and services contract for nonperformance-based agreements, Miller said.

The Program Executive Office-Enterprise Information Systems broke ITES into two categories: Functional Area 1 for IT equipment and Functional Area 2 for IT services. The U.S. Military Academy will use ITES Functional Area-2, he said.

The West Point deal marks the second task order under ITES. In early March, the Defense Logistics Agency signed an ITES Functional Area-2 task order with NCI Information Systems Inc. for software maintenance support at the U.S. Transportation Command, located with the Air Force's Air Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill.