At today’s Navy Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) Industry Day in DC, the Navy NGEN program team announced that the holders of the Navy’s current intranet program contract,Hewlett-Packard’s EDS, would be approached with a single-source contract to continue to maintain their outsourced Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) while the Navy continues with the herculean task of getting a whole new network procurement program in place.

The NMCI contract expires in September of 2010. At current projections, because of the size and required oversight for the NGEN contract, NGEN won’t be ready to begin deployment until at least mid-2011. And there’s the small matter of being able to migrate from NMCI, the infrastructure of which is owned by EDS.

So, to bridge the gap, the Navy announced that it would be working with EDS to award them a sole-source contract to continue to support the network for the expected transition period — which is expected to last about 28 months after the contract start. The contract will also include terms by which the government will have continued access to the network during the transition, and obtain a government-use license for all of the intellectual property required for NGEN-bidders to figure out how to connect to NMCI.