Karta Carts Away the Contracts

Karta Technologies, Inc. of San Antonio, TX has reeled off a series of defense-related contract successes for its consulting, IT, and e-learning services. The contracts, worth between $500 million – $2.3 billion, make Karta a company to notice among mid-range contractors in the IT and e-learning space.

Its most recent award was a $483 million contract and a position as a prime contractor for the United States Army’s Distributed Learning Education and Training Products (DLETP) program. The Karta Team is tasked with delivering distance learning to troops whenever and wherever training is needed, meeting the constantly changing needs of the Army and the Nation while at war.

As a prime contractor on the program, Karta has assembled a team of 17 partners including strategic partners, CACI, SRA, and IBM. Product and Services providers include Allen Interactions, Carney, Coastal, CollabWorx, Eagle Systems, FC Business Solutions, Information Experts, Ngrain, Pinneast, SIMmersion, SumTotal, The Logistics Company, Thomson NETg, and Visual Purple.

GoLearn Content

In July 2005, Karta announced a contract by the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) under the GoLearn federal government e-learning program. GoLearn focuses on unifying, simplifying, and increasing access to high quality e-learning products and services to help advance the accomplishment of federal agency missions. The program offers federal agency employees a wide range of online learning and career growth opportunities, including academic, technical, executive, and organizational training.

OPM created GoLearn as part of its e-Training Initiative, one of the e-government initiatives on the President’s Management Agenda.
Karta’s contract is for Specialized Technical Areas (STA) 2 – Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) training content under the GoLearn Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) program. In addition, Karta is a subcontractor to IBM for STA 4 – Implementation, Customization, and Integration Support Services and STA 5 – Consulting and Transformational Change Management.

Karta will provide its web-based Information Security COTS program, Train2Secure, as well as support implementation, customization, and integration services and consulting and transformational change management with their partner IBM.

DLA Contract worth up to $9.3M

An August 2005 IT contract with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) for a minimum 1-year, $1.4 million, plus four additional 12-month option periods, could bring in a total of $9.3 million.

Along with Enterprise Integration, Inc. (Eii) and IDS Scheer, Karta will provide a scalable and flexible solution for DLA requirements on the Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support program (DMLSS). The medical logistics community requires a multi-organizational, multi-disciplinary approach to future healthcare supply that spans the military services, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Military Health System (MHS), their coalition partners, and commercial industry.

The Karta-Eii team will provide systems engineering expertise in the areas of systems architecture, requirements engineering, information assurance, and standards compliance. The overall goal of this program is to provide comprehensive, standardized, unified, and policy-compliant enterprise architecture in order to further modernize and transform medical logistics.

The team will also monitor and interpret MHS policies, Department of Defense (DoD) policies, and related engineering policies re: systems acquisition, architecture, interoperability, and information assurance, in order to determine applicability to the DMLSS program.

Prime Contractor Status for $1.9B DESP II

finally, Karta was one of the July 2005 winners in the competition for prime contractor status, allowing them to compete for portions of a contract worth up to $1.9 billion over the next five years.

The contract, dubbed Design and Engineering Support Program (DESP II), has a wide scope aimed at technology and engineering services. The purpose of the contract is to provide rapid, high quality engineering and technical services to the Air Force Air Logistics Center, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), the Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM), Department of Defense agencies, and other government entities (e.g., NASA, DOT, DOS, EPA, OSHA, etc.).

As a prime contractor, Karta harnesses the power of its own engineers and experts and, when appropriate, will partner to win contracts. The Karta Team of subcontractors consists of nine small businesses, 11 large corporations, and six public partners.