TAA & DoDIN APL Cisco Networking for Montana

Every Montana state IT or telecommunications purchase runs through the ITPR process, which requires review from both SITSD and the State Procurement Services Division (SPSD) before an agency can execute or renew a contract — a two-signature checkpoint that applies whether an agency is buying a single switch stack or a multi-site SD-WAN refresh. SPSD also negotiates statewide term contracts for commonly used goods and services, and the state posts opportunities through its eMACS online bidding platform, giving vendors and agencies a single point of visibility into active solicitations.

Malmstrom Air Force Base, nine miles east of Great Falls, hosts the 341st Missile Wing and its 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles spread across 23 missile alert facilities and roughly 13,800 square miles of dispersed silos — a geographically extreme network footprint that depends on hardened, redundant connectivity rather than a single campus build. Montana's higher-education backbone runs through Montana State University in Bozeman and the University of Montana in Missoula, both land-grant research institutions whose federally funded labs and research computing needs add a second, non-defense category of Cisco demand statewide.