HUD awards $860 million IT contract
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The Housing and Urban Development Department has awarded EDS Corp. a 10-year, $860 million contract to take over most of HUD's IT systems. <br>
The Housing and Urban Development Department has awarded EDS Corp. a 10-year, $860 million contract to take over most of HUD's IT systems.
EDS' information service group will revamp the department's nationwide infrastructure under the HUD IT Service contract. The contract, awarded Thursday, has a one-year base period worth $15 million and nine one-year options.
The company will furnish personnel, hardware and software, telecommunications, facilities and services needed to deliver HUD's basic IT infrastructure functions.
'This is a performance-based contract that will increase vendor accountability, which is part of President Bush's management agenda for federal agencies,' Vickers Meadows, HUD's assistant secretary for administration and CIO, said in a statement. The department will use measurable performance standards and pay EDS according to how well those standards are met, he said.
EDS will provide end-to-end IT services to 18,000 HUD users in more than 80 locations throughout the United States and its territories. The services covered include enterprisewide data processing and management, information security, help desk and user support, LAN and WAN, and Web administration.
HITS is a follow-on to the HUD Integrated Information Processing Service contract awarded in 1990 to Lockheed Martin Corp. The Lockheed contract expires this year; HUD officials had hoped to award its replacement last year but took longer to issue the final solicitation than had originally been planned.
Although the department has always planned for HITS to be more sweeping than its predecessor and for the new vendor to take over more the department's system management, some efforts will remain separate. In its procurement brief, the department noted, for instance, that any application software currently being developed under HIIPS will be bought separately from the new contract.
The EDS team has more than 30 subcontractors, including AT&T Corp., Dell Corp., IBM Corp., Sprint Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.
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