04 January 2013, 16:22

Report: NASA open source project slowed by commercial vendor

NASA logo A project to move NASA's content management system to an open-source-based architecture has been slowed down because of a bid protest by a proprietary vendor, according to a report by Frank Konkel in FCW. As part of NASA's Open Government Plan, the space administration wants to migrate the CMS systems that power 140 web sites, including www.nasa.gov, and 1600 web applications and assets to an open-source-based architecture.

In mid-December it awarded the first of four one-year options to InfoZen under a $40 million blanket purchase agreement after a bid process which began in July 2012. InfoZen's CTO said it "wanted to break the mold of proprietary CMS architectures" with a "very flexible" architecture which beat five other competitors in the bid.

But eTouch Federal Systems, who previously had the contract for the work, has filed a formal bid protest against that deal. The review by the US Government's Accountability Office will take until 8 April to report. NASA had previously said that InfoZen would be creating a cloud-based solution for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to support internal and external web sites and applications such as content management, search and collaboration through wikis and blogs.

(djwm)

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