The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded a one-year, sole-source contract to Ball Aerospace for "accelerated cloud transition," or ACT, services, according to a FedBizOpps notice posted Feb. 9.

The contract award will cover the acquisition of data tagging, validation, submission storage, and protection of data in the Intelligence Community IT Environment (ICITE) cloud.

The task order will "enhance existing data tagging capabilities on commercial cloud services and [ICITE] GovCloud," the announcement states. "ACT will extend the cloud transformation storage and submission services capability by completing the design and development and delivering and sustaining a fully functional and operational capability to connect to additional NGA geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) data sources, properly mark the data originating from that source utilizing a community standard, and then 'post' or send that object to a community cloud for further processing to make the data discoverable."

The award is a continuation of a previous order. Follow-on competition related to the program is expected in March.

In a December interview with C4ISR & Networks, NGA Deputy Director Sue Gordon talked about the significance of ICITE as part of larger integration across the IC, and how the need to collaborate with industry today may be different than the traditional government acquisition model.

NGA officials have to "make sure that we are full contributors to this grand quest of ICITE that, while it has some interesting efficiency aspects, to me implies integration in a way that we have not even seen. How do we make ourselves ready technically to play in the manner we are going to need to? So that's a big area," Gordon said. "A subset of that major quest is how do we make ourselves attractive to our industry partners? That is, how are we good to work with? How do we have an environment where if they've got solutions, they can present them to us and we can interact with them in a way that is fast?"

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