There’s dancing in the streets of Mountain View as the Sun Microsystems Inc Federal unit celebrates the largest contract in its history. The contract is to supply the US Army with an estimated 28,000 workstations and servers in a new 10-year tactical command and control systems contract. The contract, potentially valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, is part of the Army’s Common Hardware-Software 2 contract, awarded to a team made up of the government divisions of GTE Corp, Sun, Litton Industries Inc and Codar Technology Inc. The award replaced a previous contract to Miltope Corp using Hewlett-Packard Co workstations, which makes the victory all the sweeter. The systems will support the Army’s command and control activities, and will provide the Army with a common family of hardware, software and applications using Sparc and Solaris. Products to be supplied – many will have to be subcontracted – are workstations, servers, large screen displays, bridges, routers, printers, scanners, and secure operating systems, Department of Defense protocols and a variety of custom applications. The equipment is all going to have to be ruggedised to make it capable of performing under extreme conditions in the field without going into a terminal decline.
