EDS joins Lockheed ERA team

EDS won a one-year subcontract from Lockheed Martin Corp. to support the National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archives (ERA).

"EDS is certainly a valuable teammate on our program," said Tom Kelley, Lockheed Martin's deputy program director for the NARA ERA contract. He added that Lockheed joined EDS on a previous large data program, the Census 2000 contract. "We teamed with them in part because of their past performance in the deployment of large data centers."

Lockheed Martin and Harris Corp. will compete during the next year to design a blueprint for the National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archives program, officials announced last month.

EDS will lead deployment centers and records management for the ERA contract competition. Officials did not disclose the value of the subcontract.

Design awards for teams led by Lockheed's transportation and security solutions division and Harris' government communications systems division were announced at $9.5 million and $10.6 million, respectively. Federal officials hope that electronic archiving will extend beyond government to make it possible, for example, for doctors to quickly access health records.

Accessible to government officials and the public, the ERA will be a dynamic system for preserving virtually any electronic record.

NARA officials are supposed to have an operational archive based on one of the two teams' designs by 2007. They expect full development of NARA system to cost $500 million by its completion in 2011.