The U.S. government’s latest telecom contract award cycle is set to wind down soon but Lumen Technologies managed to secure one of the few remaining awards this week, bagging a sizable deal with Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
As part of the 11-year, $137 million task order, Lumen will replace CBP’s current MPLS system with a new SD-WAN solution. It will also use its edge compute platform to provide other network services to hundreds of CBP locations.
Zain Ahmed, Lumen’s Public Sector SVP, told Fierce the contract is new business for the operator.
The deal comes as the federal government’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) telecom contract award cycle comes to a close. By September 30, 2022, all government agencies are required to have transitioned their old Networx, WITS3 and Local Telecommunications contracts to EIS. As of May 31, only 8.2% of EIS task orders had yet to be awarded, according to data from the General Services Administration.
Lumen previously scored a number of large EIS awards, including a $23 million contract with the Army Reserve Command; a $52 million deal with the Army Recruiting Command; an SD-WAN contract with Navy JAG; and a $1.6 billion deal to modernize network services for the Department of Interior. Most recently, it bagged a $1.2 billion contract in January to overhaul the Department of Agriculture’s network infrastructure.
Ahmed said the Covid-19 pandemic slowed the award of task orders, but agencies are still pushing to meet the aforementioned September deadline. In terms of what kind of orders have been put out there, he noted “in general, we’ve been seeing a lot of like-for-like activity as opposed to true IT modernization efforts, with some notable exceptions.”
Though there are only a “handful of [EIS] opportunities” remaining, Ahmed said the public sector will still play a key role in its business going forward.
After EIS contracts dry up, “Lumen will continue to pursue IT modernization contracts with federal, state and local government agencies, with a particular focus on public safety,” he concluded.