NMCI

The Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) is a United States Department of the Navy program which provides a vast majority of information technology services for the entire Department, including the United States Navy and Marine Corps.

As of March 2008, NMCI included more than 363,000 computers, serving more than 707,000 Sailors, Marines and civilians in 620 locations in the continental United States, Hawaii, and Japan, making it the largest internal computer network in the world. The network's 4,100 servers handle over 2.3 petabytes of data.

NMCI established an interoperable command and control network that provides the IT platform necessary for transitioning to a net-centric environment. Acting Department of Defense (DoD) CIO Terry Halvorsen described NMCI as a "forcing function within the DON to attend to our legacy infrastructure of applications, servers and networks.”

While recent statements by the Navy have been very positive about NMCI, a 2007 survey of users reported it unstable, slow, and frustrating.

"NMCI has been a hugely successful program for the Navy," Weller said during a press briefing with reporters [14 October 2010]. "It has been a cost-effective way to deliver unprecedented level of service. We learned a lot about how to do it and how not to do it."

"Anytime you transition from where you have a high degree of localized control to a high degree of centralized control, there will be some disgruntled folks," Weller said. "I think since we already are in that world, about 70 percent of the Navy's IT infrastructure, we are in a world where the Navy has complete control and authority over how we operate the network. That has allowed us to maintain extremely high degree of security, which is frankly our number one issue. The only way that we are aware of you can do that is to have tight configuration management and tight central control. So that is where a lot of the complaints came from. To that note, what have we done to lessen blow in future? I think the answer is we don't need to because we are already there."

On 30 September 2010, the NMCI contract ended and the new Continuity of Services Contract (COSC) began. The COSC gives the Navy and Marine Corps the best of the current NMCI IT environment while driving operations continuity, cost savings, network control, competition and contract management. Under the COSC, the Navy retains the same scope of NMCI services with HP, but the network becomes a government-owned, contractor-supported, managed services environment.

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