Defense Department hires HP
Shortly after Congress grills it on privacy, subsidiary of U.S. agency enlists company to build IT infrastructures.
The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, a combat support agency of the Department of Defense that handles IT and communications functions, has awarded two eight-year utility-computing contracts to Hewlett-Packard. These contracts, which have a ceiling of $440 million, give HP the task of building computer infrastructures for 17 of DISA's locations around the world.
One of the contracts, capped at $250 million, involves the construction of HP-UX environments; the other is a $190 million contract for Microsoft's Windows, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and Novell's SUSE Linux operating systems. HP's own Integrity and ProLiant servers will be used. Despite this partnership with the U.S. government, HP nevertheless recently underwent congressional hearings regarding its information leak scandal.