US Navy opposes EDS contract

IT'S SOMEWHAT UNUSUAL for any US Defense Department (DoD) IT contract to make the news. Most of them are relatively small -- a few hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars here or there -- under the radar.

But, as the late Senator Everett Dirksen remarked: "A billion dollars here and there, pretty soon it adds up to real money." Well... there's a $6.9 billion EDS contract to provide IT infrastructure management and services to the U.S. Navy that's gotten some press just lately, related to its problems, and it's in the Washington Post now, no less.

Electronic Data Systems (EDS) is a very large IT outsourcer, second only to IBM itself, larger than Computer Sciences (CSC), Unisys, others. EDS runs most of government IT in Australia and New Zealand, and (Cough!) the UK, for example. Its list of board of directors makes for interesting reading.

So EDS has snagged a contract with the U.S. Navy to outsource all of the desktops and servers in U.S. Navy military. But a major problem is that it seems the U.S. Navy wasn't consulted. They're not glad to greet EDS, and they've been digging in their heels, as well they should, to attempt to save their systems and unique capabilities developed over decades.

Forget the Washington Post equivocations. Their story is just a mishmash of noise and doesn't seem to understand any of the real issues, much less arrive at any positions about them. The real issue is, should the United States outsource core IT functions of its military branches? Will the U.S. depend upon EDS and (Cough!) Worldcom for its national security?

Your writer happens to be aware of many systems that NMCI might kill, along with a large number of Navy related jobs, simply because the systems don't run on Microsoft platforms, the only systems supported under that EDS NMCI contract. These are many, including Sun, SGI, IBM, HP... and others.

Dare we hand the whole kit and caboodle over to EDS?. µ

L'Inq
Washington Post article