Digital Battlespace
AFCEA West 2012: Bidders eye USN network project
HP Enterprise Services has readied its bid for the US Navy's Next Generation (NGEN) competition to provide network capabilities, as it anticipates the release of an RFP from the US DoD.
The RFP is expected to be issued in March after a series of RFIs were released last year, and is estimated to be worth some $1.4 billion.
Bill Toti, HP vice president for navy and marine accounts, told Shephard at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego, US on 24 January, that the company was 'very confident' in its bid.
NGEN will see the winning bidder provide network services to the navy, which has some 700,000 users, and HP is the prime on a team consisting of Northrop Grumman, IBM and AT&T.
'We have a traditional defence company, a traditional long haul and wireless provider, and the largest locations service provider,' Toti explained.
Rolf Holman, vice president for US strategic sales, added that the consortium benefits as the other companies are immersed in other DoD areas that HP is not, and therefore brings in experience across the board.
HP currently provides the 'biggest network in the world', the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), and 'we did everything from designing the networks to the integration', Toti said. The contract was awarded in 2000 and is set to end in 2014, and NGEN is to be an evolution of the NMCI, with both being controlled by the Naval Enterprise Networks (NEN) Program Office.
'We had the secret sauce; sometimes we detect malware before McAfee does,' he said.
'In the process of making it the biggest network on the planet, we also made it the most secure. There is no such thing as plug and play on NMCI, everything has to be reprogrammed. It is extremely labour intensive to bring in something like an i-pad [onto the NMCI].
He warned that there should not be 'standardisation for standardisation's sake', and making everything the same is not necessarily in the military's best interest, as competitions such as N-
Gen keep down costs.
As far as the challenges of cyber usage within the military are concerned, Toti said that 'it's going to be a challenge to stay ahead of the bad guys, but it is a bell that has to be rung'.
Utilising its experience as the lead on the UK MoD's DII programme that aims to modernise its network, HP is 'going country by country using DII' to prove to other nations such as Australia, Germany and the Czech Republic the benefit of HP's offerings, Holman concluded.
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