The US Coast Guard Opts for Dell IT Services for IT Field Support

The U.S. Coast Guard selected Perot Systems Government Services, a unit of Dell (News - Alert) Services and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell, to provide IT field support services for critical mission and rescue systems.

This contract is an expansion of the work the company has been providing to the USCG through its PSGS subsidiary for the past decade.

Enterprise-wide support services for the entire USCG will be provided by Dell Services, as part of the new five-year, $92 million Standard Workstation and Communication Infrastructure Support Blanket Purchase Agreement contract. This will be done in order to include its eventual new home office at the Department of Homeland Security’s new headquarters at the Saint Elizabeth site in Washington D.C.

The USCG will be the first agency to move into the new St. Elizabeth’s headquarters, which is expected to open between 2012 and 2013. To centralize all of the necessary support functions while achieving cost savings, the Department of Homeland Security plans to consolidate many of its agency headquarters, currently dispersed throughout the greater Washington D.C. metropolitan area, into one location.

The Coast Guard, with the help of Dell’s subsidiary, has been offered with a number of key initiatives over the years, including providing support during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and in developing key mission-critical software applications. The company, during Hurricane Katrina, stood up several large command posts and ensured vital connectivity for more than 1,900 responders from 81 USCG units.

The team also helped develop a complex global vessel tracking system that is now used to support national and international security efforts, as well as marine search-and-rescue operations.

Many mission-critical software applications such as the Marine Information System for Law Enforcement have been built and deployed by the company’s engineers. The USCG, with these efforts have been able to respond more quickly to emergency demands, both domestically and internationally and also have streamlined their emergency operations while improving the timeliness of information.

To help support the USCG’s Deepwater Horizon clean-up efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dell Services team provided emergency field side support services of over 1,500 fully-imaged laptops and servers within days.

Currently, Dell Services offers enterprise-wide software development, operations and full lifecycle support for 51 operationally-focused applications that are used by the USCG; other DHS groups and agencies; the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

In a press release, Lee Carrick, vice president of Dell Services’ Federal Government Division said, “We’ve been a proud Coast Guard provider for a number of years and are honored that the Coast Guard has chosen us to continue our relationship in support of this new contract. Dell Services is looking forward to being the IT provider to the first agency at the new Department of Homeland Security headquarters in Washington D.C. This contract presents a significant opportunity for the USCG to demonstrate the benefits of a true enterprise-wide approach to IT management using virtualization, cloud computing, and enterprise backup and storage among other services. We look forward to helping the Coast Guard continue achieving their service missions.”

In related news, Dell Services and Symantec (News - Alert) have entered into an expanded strategic partnership under which Dell Services will utilize Symantec's e-mail security platform as the security engine for its Email Management Services portfolio of Software-as-a-Service solutions.