Weekly GEOINT Community News

NGA Awards Leidos IT Management Contract; DXC Reaches Three-Way Deal with Vencore and Keypoint; Northern California Wildfire Relief; Vricon Awarded USSOCOM Contract; Engility Wins DoD Security Contract; & More

CaliFires

NGA Awards Leidos IT Management Contract

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) awarded Leidos a prime contract under the Information Technology Enterprise Management (ITEMS) User Facing Services (UFS) program. The contract is a five-year IDIQ agreement for a single payment of up to $988 million. Leidos will take command of NGA’s IT management and will transition UFS away from current NGA contracts.

DXC Reaches Three-Way Deal with Vencore and Keypoint

To accommodate a three-way deal with Veritas Capital’s Vencore and Keypoint Government Services, DXC Technology is spinning out its U.S. public sector offering. The three businesses will combine to create a new publically traded government contracting company. The merger is expected to close by March 31, 2018. The resulting company will focus on cyber, big data analytics, cloud computing, and enterprise IT.

Northern California Wildfire Relief

The GEOINT Community is using data to help fight the devastating wildfires in Northern California. DigitalGlobe released high-resolution imagery of affected areas in Santa Rosa, as well as a more extensive collection of before-and-after imagery available to emergency responders on the Santa Rosa wildfires page.

Esri released an interactive ArcGIS map visualizing active fire locations, traffic alerts, and other near-real-time data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USGS, and Waze. The map provides an accurate, up-to-date picture of the situation on the ground in California.

Vricon Awarded USSOCOM Contract

U.S. Special Operations Command awarded Vricon Systems a $1,271,765 sole source contract for commercial data and software testing. Under the contract, Vricon will work to increase the resolution and accuracy of SOCOM’s 3D geospatial data and will automate workflows to reduce time-consuming manual work.

Engility Wins DoD Security Contract 

Engility announced it will partner with the DoD to protect critical acquisition processes and weapons systems from foreign hacking. Engility will address existing vulnerabilities and mitigate future cyber attacks primarily in support of the DoD’s Damage Assessment Management Office and Joint Acquisition Protection and Exploitation Cell. The contract has a one-year base with four option years and is valued at $28 million. 

PAR Technology Subsidiary Awarded Air Force Subcontract

Rome Research Corporation, a subsidiary of PAR Technology, was awarded a subcontract from Croop-LaFrance to provide client support services to the U.S. Air Force’s 72nd Air Base Wing Communications Directorate at Tinker AFB, Okla. The contract is valued at $11.9 million and has a one-year base with up to four option years.

University of Missouri Uses Deep Learning to Detect Chinese Missile Sites

The University of Missouri’s Center for Geospatial Intelligence, a USGIF-accredited school, used machine learning to help human analysts parse through large volumes of imagery in search of surface-to-air missile sites in southeast China. This deep learning approach delivered an average search time of 42 minutes for 90,000 km areas—more than 80 times the efficiency of human visual searches. The research study was published in a special issue of the SPIE Journal of Applied Remote Sensing.

Peer Intel

Northrop Grumman named Kathy Warden its next president and COO following the retirement of current president and COO Gloria Fatch. Additionally, corporate VP of government relations Sid Ashworth will retire at the end of this year. Mark Caylor will become corporate VP and president for mission systems, Shawn Purvis will become corporate VP and president for enterprise services, and Lesley Kalan will become corporate VP for government relations. Warden will oversee these three branches of operation as well as the integration of Orbital ATK once the merge is complete.

Photo Credit: DigitalGlobe

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