The largest internal computer network in the world, NMCI served more than 707,000 sailors, marines, and civilians in 620 locations across the continental United States, Hawaii, and Japan as of March 2008.
[3] 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.
[4]” While recent statements by the Navy have been very positive about NMCI,[5] a 2007 survey of users reported it unstable, slow, and frustrating.
[8] This is a paradigm shift because under the original NMCI contract, the government managed the network at a distance and did not own any IT assets used in the program.
It was inefficient and from the larger Department perspective, produced results that were far from optimal.”[12] NMCI consolidated roughly 6,000 networks—some of which could not e-mail, let alone collaborate with each other—into a single integrated and secure IT environment.
[13] The program also consolidated an ad hoc network of more than 8,000 applications to 500 in four years and 15,003 logistics and readiness systems to 2,759 over a two-year period.
[17] NMCI quickly suffered some widely publicized setbacks, including rollout delays that caused HP financial losses.
The tool helps provide enhanced situational awareness via increased information sharing and collaboration to commanders by giving them a common picture of network performance.
Commanders can see scheduled maintenance tasks and other issues impacting the network, giving them the option to defer work that might affect the flow of critical information from the battlefield.
[21] Work in 2008 has increased NMCI's ability to respond to security issues and the program was the first network to implement fully the Department of Defense information assurance standards in both classified and unclassified environments.
Among the enhancements were the deployment of Websense content filtering, an information assurance tool designed to inspect and block inbound Web traffic containing malicious code with little impact to the user.
This allows the network operators to block sites much more efficiently and outsources the fight against the growing amount of inappropriate content.
John A. Gauss, Acquisition Director for the NGEN System Program Office (SPO) said during a press conference that "NMCI is the most secure network within the Navy.
This is largely due to the upgrade of nearly 112,000 desktop and laptop computers in 2007, and a combination of network enhancements that are improving speed and reliability.
[24] Additionally, the decrease in the number of servers being refreshed will lower the cost of updating the equipment, leading to a potential savings of at least $1.5 million over four years.
These organizations have not only helped the planet by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, preserving trees, and keeping e-waste out of landfills.
They've also reaped measurable business benefits, such as significantly lower electricity bills, fewer hardware refreshes, and postponed datacenter-expansion projects – along with gains in efficiency and productivity."
One NMCI director, Rear Admiral James B. Godwin III, said releasing the results would challenge the "integrity of our data."
According to Captain Tim Holland, program manager for the Navy's Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), "NMCI is very robust today[when?
The report states that " NMCI has not met its two strategic goals—to provide information superiority and to foster innovation via interoperability and shared services."
of the contract, technology initiatives included new hardware, applications, and services to support the Navy and Marine Corps' advanced IT needs.
[3] The Naval Enterprise Networks (NEN) program office, in collaboration with NMCI partner HP, which manages the CoSC program, is deploying a number of new Navy initiatives, including: Tablet laptops for Navy recruiters Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) capability Expanded support for smartcards Enterprise-wide operating system upgrade and improved end-user hardware delivery times On 31 March 2009, the Department of the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare System Command announced its intention to negotiate a Continuity of Service Contract (COSC) that would allow HP to continue to provide IT services during the transition from the existing contract (NMCI) to the proposed next contract, known as Next Generation Enterprise Network Solution (NGEN).
HP claims to be accelerating its technology refresh activities which include deploying new, faster computers which should improve performance while maintaining tight security.
Further, because NMCI's first priority was to rein in the counterproductive customization and proliferation of applications and networks,[33] users are not given permissions to change computers’ settings.
[31] Despite early challenges, NMCI will be the foundation on which the Navy and Marine Corps can build to support their broader strategic information management objectives.
Now that’s been eliminated since it’s no longer cost effective to care about the users for the remainder of this contract seeing as how the new contract has been signed and made official...Stretched for resources as they are, people like me are pulled from their normal duties (dealing with customer issues, training agents, and completing order requests) to just answer basic Service Desk calls.