Lumen's winning streak for nabbing federal government contracts continued with two recent wins with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Lumen is now an authorized service provider for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ $721 million National Local Exchange Carrier Next Generation contract vehicle. It also snagged a spot on VA’s $195 million Data and Wide Area Network Carrier contract vehicle.
“Veterans Affairs awarded Lumen coveted spots on two next-generation network services contract vehicles that will help the agency carry out its mission to provide Veterans with the world-class benefits and services they’ve earned,” said David Young, Lumen senior vice president for the public sector and the company’s global hyperscaler business in a statement. “As we honor Veterans for their service, Lumen’s amazing platform for data and applications is ideally positioned to help government agencies like the VA achieve their IT modernization goals.”
As an authorized service provider on the VA’s National Local Exchange Carrier Next Generation services contract, Lumen—which is currently doing business as CenturyLink in the federal government market—can bid on task orders for a range of voice, video and data network services that support essential communications at VA medical centers and clinics. The contract is a multiple-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract with a $721 million ceiling for all task orders over a 15-year period.
Lumen was one of two vendors to win a spot on the VA’s Data and Wide Area Network services contract for modernizing the entire agency’s IT infrastructure and moving toward secure managed network and Ethernet services. That contract has a potential value of $195 million for service orders placed over a 12-year period and was awarded under the General Services Administration’s 15-year, $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) program.
Thanks in part to the large federal contracts, Lumen's enterprise segment revenue increased to $1.44 billion in the recent third quarter compared to $1.43 billion in the same quarter a year ago. On a sequential basis, enterprise grew 0.4%.
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Last year, CenturyLink was the first supplier to receive authority to operate under the General Service Administration's $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) program. Since then, the company has won contracts with the Department of the Interior, the Department of Defense and the Social Security Administration. Lumen provides government agencies with security and reliability by supplying cybersecurity, cloud, managed hosting and IT services.
The EIS program is replacing the federal government's current contracts for purchasing network services, which were originally set to expire in March 2020. Now those contracts, which the government says are worth about $2.2 billion a year, have been extended to May 2023.
The federal government is in the process of moving its telecommunication contracts to EIS. By March 31 of next year, 50% of agencies' telecom inventory must come from EIS contracts, and by September 2022 100% of their inventory must be from those contracts.
AT&T and Verizon, among others, have also won contracts under EIS. AT&T has a 15-year, $984 million contract to provide IP voice, data, security, cloud access and professional services to the Department of Justice while Verizon has won contracts with the IRS and the Social Security Administration.