Virginia has reached two milestones in its long, litigious effort to disentangle the state’s vast information technology network from a multibillion-dollar contract with Northrop Grumman.
The state awarded a $120 million, five-year contract this week to the North American subsidiary of Atos, a French-based global technology company, to provide advanced managed security services to state executive branch agencies. The deal also provides for extending the five-year term.
The agreement, announced Monday, is the fourth contract the state has awarded for services that had been provided solely by Northrop Grumman under a $2.4 billion, 13-year contract that will expire in mid-2019.
On the same day, Virginia completed the transition of more than 55,000 state employees to a new, Google-based messaging system, after a costly, protracted stalemate between the state’s IT agency and Northrop Grumman over the terms of their increasingly bitter divorce.
The completion of the three-phased transition on Monday ended a crucial stage in the disentanglement process, begun almost two years ago when the state awarded the contract for messaging services to Tempus Nova, only to have the service put in limbo by the legal battle between the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, or VITA, and Northrop Grumman.
“We have ‘turned off’ all Northrop Grumman messaging services,” Chief Information Officer Nelson Moe said in a statement on Tuesday.
The turning point in the continuing legal saga occurred in a Richmond courtroom in September, when Circuit Judge Gregory L. Rupe ordered the Fairfax County-based technology giant to cooperate with VITA in carrying out the transition for messaging and mainframe services, while telling the state to pay fees for previous service that it had withheld because of the stalled transition.
VITA also has awarded contracts to new vendors for mainframe computer services and “multisource service integration,” or management and coordination of all state IT services. The state began transitioning the mainframe services to DXC, a spinoff from Hewlett Packard, almost a year ago, and has completed that process.
The final steps of the disentanglement process will be the award of contracts later this year for computer servers, storage and data centers; end users; and voice and data network services.
“As you can imagine, this is a complex process,” Moe said in the statement. “Northrop Grumman has provided infrastructure services, including internet, networks, servers, messaging and cybersecurity, for nearly 13 years.”
“Untangling those services and awarding shorter contracts to multiple providers involves developing comprehensive requests for proposals following state purchasing regulations, detailed implementation planning and actually transitioning to new providers without interrupting state services,” he said.
Northrop Grumman had declined to bid on the new service contracts, warning the state against its approach of splitting IT services into separate contracts with multiple vendors instead of one agreement for all services.
VITA declared the company in breach of contract in mid-2016, setting the stage for dueling lawsuits filed by Northrop Grumman against the state last May and by VITA against the company the next month.
An attempt to broker an agreement to settle the dispute collapsed early last year when then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe refused to approve it because he said it would require the state to pay again for services it already had bought.
As the state sought help from the courts in September in carrying out the transition of messaging and mainframe services under the first wave of disentanglement, it awarded a contract to Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, to manage the multiple services and providers under the state’s new approach to the government’s IT system.
The contract with Atos is designed to ensure security of the transformed IT system.