NASA, one of the biggest computer users on — and off — the planet is about to make some sweeping changes in its Herculean computer networks, and that will mean awarding myriad desirable contracts to industry, including small businesses.

At an hours-long industry day briefing at the Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., NASA officials gave a series of briefings on impending space agency bid solicitations and contract awards, providing an audience of hundreds of contractor representatives myriad dos and don’ts as the space agency moves into a year of handing out an array of contracts.

The general idea is to have requests for proposals released next January, with proposals received in April next year, and then contracts in place by Dec. 1. Further industry days will be held in coming weeks to provide more information.

For information on the acquisition program, go to http://i3p-acq.ksc.nasa.gov on the Web.

Briefers included Mike Bolger, director of the NASA Information Technology and Communication Services Directorate; Jonathan Pettus, chief NASA information officer; Bill McNally, assistant NASA administrator for procurement; Mike Hecker, director of the Constellation spaceship development program, and Glenn Delgado, assistant NASA administrator in the NASA small business office.

The IT effort is called I3P, for IT Infrastructure Integration Program – Acquisition.

While many details weren’t provided at the midweek briefing — such as the exact number of contracts, precisely what NASA will procure in each pact, the amount the agency will pay contractors, what each contractor must offer to be eligible, and the like — the briefing provided a glimpse of the staggering scope of the work.

Consider these points:

• IT spending at the space agency amounts to an awesome $1.8 billion yearly.
• The agency uses 4,500 applications.
• It also has 8,000 Web sites, of which 2,000 are "public facing."
• There are three Wide Area Networks, and an immense number of local area networks.
• As for hardware, there are 80,000 desktop and laptop computers.
• Then there are 15,000 servers in 75 data centers.

The broad picture here is that NASA has multiple centers scattered around the nation, such as Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Kennedy Space Center, Fla., where space shuttles will blast off until their retirement in 2010, Johnson Space Center in Houston where mission control guides the shuttles, Langley Research Center at Hampton, Va., and more.

While the centers each have elaborate IT systems, computers in one center may not link easily to those in another center. The new program aims to fix that.

These are some of the key points in the briefings:

• There are four guiding principles, with the first one being that IT at NASA exists to enable NASA missions, to serve the computer users, whether they are researchers or astronauts. Also, NASA wishes to integrate mission processes and information across organizational boundaries; have IT achieve efficiencies and ensure that it is efficiently implemented; and ensure that IT operations are secure.
• This will be done as NASA moves ahead with its Constellation Program that is developing the next-generation Orion space capsule and the Ares rocket powering Orion into space. Orion will see its first manned mission in 2015.
• While the I3P will handle many of the contracts, some still may be handled out of individual NASA centers.
• Keeping costs down is a big point. So the lesson is, give NASA your lowest bid consistent with good performance.
• Overseers of the IT program will include three panels: an IT strategy and investment board, a separate IT program management board that ensures that procurement programs approved by the first panel remain on schedule and on track, and an IT management board.
• There will be performance incentives, fees for good contractor performance.
• Types of IT assets involved here include data, voice, video, and more, plus network management. And there will be work integrating local area networks in each of the NASA centers into the overall NASA intranet, and expanding the bandwidth capacity of the Wide Area Networks.
• Security is crucial, and one move will be encrypting data flows.
• Some general areas of work will include infrastructure applications and Web site services, such as content management for Web sites and development of Web content.
• Email, calendaring and more will be addressed.
• There will be multiple overlapping security services.
• Broken down by categories, NASA will be seeking communications services involving WANs, LANs, computers and other items, where Brad Solomon at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will be the point of contact.
• End-users services contracts are needed in an agency with 62,000 users and 80,000 desktop and laptop computers. Terry Jackson at the NASA Shared Service Center at the Stennis Space Center, Miss., is the technical point of contact.
• Data center services contracting will help in three agency data centers with 15,000 servers and 4,500 hosted applications (this involves consolidating back office services and other work). Lynn Heimerl at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., is the technical point of contract.
• Web services contracting will relate to Web sites with 193 million visits, 14 billion hits and more. Brian Dunbar at NASA headquarters is the technical point of contact.
• Enterprise applications services supporting agency-wide business applications such as financial management, human capital, asset management and more, will have Amy Stapleton at Marshall as the technical point of contact.

In the acquisition process, it generally will follow Federal Acquisition Regulations, or FAR.

Some open, and significant, questions will remain unanswered for now. Will the next president who will be elected in November continue support for the I3P program? Will sufficient funds be available throughout the program? McNally noted that the IT program needs "enough money to buy what we need," while setting the right requirements. Will bundled-together larger contracts of, say, $100 million be broken down so smaller companies can vie for them?

To get that last goal right, he stressed, it will be important to have input from industry.

Also, with each contract, it will be critical to delineate precisely what NASA must do, and what industry must do, giving industry latitude to determine the best way to achieve outcomes.

Whether there will be any set-asides, contracts that would be earmarked to go to small businesses, will depend on the response NASA gets from candidate firms, Delgado said.

"If you don’t show interest in [the upcoming contracts], I can’t justify doing a set-aside," he said. "Watch the Website closely," because that is where a lot of information will be released, he said.

The overall-i3p program point of contact is Mike Bolger, Office of the CIO. Use [email protected] as the address to email him.