Navy to speed cloud migration & industry involvement in NGEN-R

The Navy is accelerating cloud migration and interaction with industry partners in an effort to offset delays in the award of its Next Generation Enterprise Network Re-compete (NGEN-R) contracts.

There are two primary NGEN-R contracts; one is called End User Hardware (EUHW) covering hardware-as-a-service and hardware-for-purchase – the other is Service Management, Integration, and Transport covering print services and software build services, service desk and computer network defense. The awards are now slated to emerge in November and December of next year, Navy officials have announced.

The move moves the date of the planned contract awards by about six months.

“The overall extension is because we did not have an opportunity to fully engage with industry ahead of time. We recognize the need to allow for industry exchange, understanding how they could provide technologies,” said Navy Capt. Don Harder, deputy program executive officer for the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems.

In the meantime, Harder said Navy developers are implementing a new sprint contract development process establishing weekly industry conferences and one-on-one question and answer sessions with industry developers.

“We are using an agile software development methodology. We are drafting documents and pushing documents out to industry faster to get comments back as we develop. We are constantly getting feedback,” Harder said.

NGEN is the current contract that provides information technology (IT) and support services to the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) and the Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN).

The two networks support Navy and Marine Corps users in the Continental United States (CONUS) and Marine Corps users Outside of the Continental United States (OCONUS). NGEN-R is the follow-on contract to NGEN and will provide IT and support services to NMCI, MCEN, and Navy OCONUS users via the OCONUS Navy Enterprise Network (ONE-Net).

Harder said that increased industry interaction encourages industry input earlier on in the process to develop better acquisition documents for government and industry

“We want to develop the acquisition documents to reflect how we buy those products,” Harden said.



To ensure the successful award of the NGEN-R family of contracts without any gaps in network service, the Navy and Marine Corps needs to extend the NGEN contract.

Negotiations to extend the NGEN contracts will begin in October, following the legally mandated notice period for a sole source contract action. Negotiating and executing the extensions may take several months to complete.

The Navy anticipates negotiating a contract extension that would provide up to 23 months of continued network services along with up to 39 months of EUHW transition services for the Navy and Marine Corps. The additional time is necessary to ensure continuity of network services while providing time for the transition from one contract vehicle to another, service statements said.