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Wang wins NASA network contract

Lockheed Martin awards Wang's government services arm a $453 million, ten-year outsourcing contract to manage networks for NASA.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Lockheed Martin has awarded Wang's government services arm a $453 million, ten-year outsourcing contract to manage networks for NASA.

Wang Government Services is now a subcontractor on the huge $3.4 billion Consolidated Space Operations contract NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) recently awarded to Houston, Texas-based Lockheed Martin Space Operations.

The Wang deal marks one of the first times the federal government has outsourced all of its wide area networking (WAN) operations. Yet other government agencies, including the Internal Revenue Services, are increasingly turning to the private sector through outsourcing as a way to cut day-to-day IT costs and free their staff to focus more on strategy.

Under the contract, McLean, Virginia-based Wang Government Services will consolidate WANs that connect four NASA units, including Space Science, Mission to Planet Earth, Human Exploration and Development of Space, and Aeronautics and Space Administration. Creating one network will allow NASA to more efficiently track information collected about satellites, planetary exploration, and human space flight.

Overall, NASA's outsourcing commitment is intended to help lower the cost of space flight missions by shifting technology management of five separate NASA centers over to the Lockheed team.