As part of the SBInet, Boeing will lead a team of partners, including Unisys, Perot Systems, L-3 Communications, and Lucent, to work under a series of task orders from DHS over the next three years, plus three one-year option period. Boeing edged out fellow defense heavyweights Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as Swedish firm Ericsson, for the deal.
DHS was sure not to pinpoint a specific dollar value for the overall contract today at the announcement, according to Unisys’ Bryan Seagrave, who attended the press conference along with Boeing and top-level DHS staff.
Seagrave, Unisys’ vice president of homeland security, said the government made clear it didn’t want to put an artificial ceiling on the value of orders it can place under the contract. When asked if the $2.1bn estimate circling the media was correct, DHS Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson said it was flat out wrong.
However, DHS did award the first two task orders totaling $67m on Thursday to Boeing. The first of these was for program management services and the second is to secure the 28-mile Mexican border in Tucson, Arizona. The Tucson border project is scheduled to be completed in eight months, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said.
ComputerWire asked Boeing for more details about its role as contract lead, but company spokesperson Erick Simonsen said that no additional information would be available until the government decides so. Unisys’ Seagrave said that although it has not yet received any task orders, the company expects to see some in the coming weeks.
Seagrave said Unisys would be in charge of the SBInet systems engineering, infrastructure, and configuring and installing several key software. One of these applications is the common operating picture, which Seagrave described as the brain of SBInet.
The application receives information from a range of radar systems, border sensors, and command towers and then runs the data to interpret it using algorithms and other tools. The information is presented both spatially and textually to border agents, giving them a picture of border crossings and available agents in the area. The system allows border personnel to query law enforcement databases, much like a police officer has access to records through the computers outfitted in patrol cars, Seagrave explained.
Unisys’ experience with this sort of work includes police department, 311, and 911 systems, plus a range of surveillance and detection contracts. Seagrave said the SBInet award is a combination of these law enforcement and surveillance systems services. As it stands now, the contract isn’t the biggest border security contract Unisys has won, but Seagrave said it has the potential to become so, in terms of scope and revenue. He said more will be known as the task orders are handed down, and the awards will include both horizontal, cross-cutting technology work across the entire deal and geographically oriented deals awarded by border segment.
ComputerWire also spoke with Jim Ballard, president of government services for Perot Systems. He said it was too early to tell the types of specific services the company will be picked for, other than general infrastructure and integration work. But Ballard noted that Perot’s experience with the collections and management of health care data, such as clinical information and billing, would help it with the tremendous data project at hand. He added that Perot has only partnered with Boeing on much smaller contracts in the past.
Ballard did hint at a range for the contract, saying that the total price tag could be less than $2bn, all the way up to a much higher figure.
