NASA, the US federal space agency, has issued the final request for proposals from contractors for performing a large network-infrastructure consolidation project - part of a massive five-part program to overhaul the agency's entire IT infrastructure, titled NASA IT Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P).

Another part of the program is outsourcing the agency's enterprise data center services, including hosting, housing and end-user services. Final bid solicitation for the NASA Enterprise Data Center contract is expected to be released sometime in 2010 - change from a previous plan to issue the RFP in October of this year.

The RFP issued this week is for the agency's integrated communications services (NICS). NASA has asked contractors to submit offers for consolidation of its wide-area and local-area networks and services, transforming them into "a seamless, end-to-end network to reduce cost, implement consistent operation procedures and processes, improve security, and better integrate NASA's people, processes, and information to achieve mission success," according to the agency's Web site.

As of Friday, 16 vendors expressed interest in the contract.

NASA's overview of the current problems says the agency's CIO Linda Cureton cannot consistently secure its network perimeter, which is currently not standardized or well-defined and the agency is hard-pressed to prove its ability to meet the federal IT security mandates.

Besides security problems, Cureton - who became the agency's CIO in September - cannot account for effectiveness of its network infrastructure and therefore cannot ensure a proper level of fiscal accountability. There is not enough information to effectively manage NASA's IT budget.

Finally, the agency's segmented and complicated network infrastructure prevents it from being able to provide "effective and efficient communications services to support cross-agency collaboration."

The problem statement says collaboration is impeded by distributed management of firewalls for the agency's centers and projects and the inability to provide "consistent and secure communications between its internal networks and external networks such as the Internet and business partner networks."

The problem statement was written before Cureton stepped into her current role, replacing her predecessor Bobby German.

The agency will allow each bidder to present their offer, with presentations lasting up to 2.5 hours. The deadline for submission of questions from the industry about the RFP is January 15, 2010 and the bid submission deadline is "on or about February 26, 2010," according to the solicitation's synopsis.

The NICS RFP came one week after NASA issued the final RFP for another part of I3P - Web Enterprise Service Technologies. The agency is looking to outsource its public Web site hosting, web content management, integration and search services.

The WEST project is to provide a "single-point-of-entry Web environment and integration of NASA's general-interest, public-audience content."

About 180 companies expressed interest in bidding on the contract. The bid submission deadline for WEST is February 5, 2010.

All documents associated with the I3P bid solicitations can be found on FedBizOpps.gov.