Complaints persist about the Navy's costly NMCI network

If you work for the U.S. Navy, your email inbox may have 150 times less capacity than a Gmail account, and your local network may be out of business for days when the latest productivity suite is installed, reports Noah Shachtman at Wired magazine. The Navy has said in the past that it plans to take over its network management from long-time contractor Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), but it recently signed a $3.3 billion no-bid contract with the vendor, he reports.

The Navy Marine Corps Intranet--the world's second largest network, with 4,100 servers and approximately 1,100,000 users--was originally planned a decade ago to combine 15,000 separate IT systems, according to Shachtman. The mammoth project must be given its due for some successes, but the centrally managed system operated by an outside contractor is too rigid, too costly and too slow moving.  

The problems seem to extend beyond the proverbial Pentagon/Contractor stories of waste and inefficiency. The Navy is paying $2,490.72 annually for a typical workstation that comes with a 50 MB capacity email account and 700 MB of storage. Additional applications on a computer can cost as much as $4,026.72 a year. Nearly $3 million a year is spent on anti-spam services.

One Navy civilian is quoted saying, "HP is holding the Navy hostage, and there isn't a peep about it. We basically had two recourses: pay, or send in the Marines." Another: "When our computers are not being crippled by updates, and as long as we don't have to call the help desk for anything (i.e. we don't have any computer problems) then NMCI has somewhat stabilized."

For more:
- see Noah Shachtman's article at Wired

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