When you think about the future of government infrastructure, two major players come immediately to mind – GSA and DISA. Right now GSA is ramping up its Networx contract for telecommunications services that agencies must use by 2010 as the replacement for the expiring FTS 2001.

GSA Assistant ITS Commissioner John Johnson said that GSA is making steady progress.  

“Karl Krumbholz and his team are working each and every day to make sure agencies have a clear guide and path to move from 2001 to Networx,” said Johnson. “Fair Opportunity decisions are being made. Some large agencies including DHS, DOD and Treasury have already made theirs. Other agencies are following along.

We are hopeful of seeing a lot of movement in the next several months as we move to build seamless, secure, interoperable infrastructure. We expect all Fair Opportunity decisions to be done by September 30 as planned.”

As Networx gets implemented, industry sees great opportunities and a transformation in services delivery.

We see a real trigger of events occurring within the federal space having to do with Networx,” said Cisco’s Gary DePreto. “Now, we are seeing the transition of simple technology and contracts. We are excited about what is going to happen within 2-3 years as there will be a convergence of voice video and data collapsing into one platform.”

DePreto said in 5 years out, there will be a second transformation in the way federal agencies are going to be delivering services to IT users and citizens. “That’s what we are most excited about: not only an infrastructure transformation, but a transformation in the way we deliver services.”

“I think Networx is a good source for us and will be a good source for us,” said DISA CIO John Garing. “I think the wisdom will be if we can acquire from somebody who already has it. Remember General Croom’s ‘adopt before you buy and buy before you create theme’, we are going to use that rather than create something for our own.

Services For Work and Play

For Citrix’s Tom Simmons, the future of infrastructure centers around services delivery as well.

“Our mission is to create an environment where anyone can work or play from anywhere and the reliance on infrastructure is critical to being able to deliver the kinds of services and applications that folks need; not only to do job, but to enjoy their time away from the job.”

Simmons talked about how Citrix’s role is to provide technologies and solutions that give agencies the options and capabilities to consolidate things in data centers.

“You get all benefits of centralized management and security that creates the demand and increased expectations of the infrastructure that sits between the data center and the user community,” explained Simmons.

“Citrix’s role is to provide virtualized capabilities in the data center. We call it the dynamic data center to make sure as requirements change and user populations change, the network infrastructure changes. All are those are readily deliverable in a scalable environment with no loss in security capability,” said Simmons.

At Unisys Ed Vaccaro said they are seeing is fundamental shift in approach driven by available changes in technology.

“The fact that as we went to fully distributed environment we were looking for flexibility,” said Vaccaro, “but management was lost. Now we are pulling back because of changes in network technologies and orders of magnitude changes incapacity that we have gained.”

Vaccaro spends a lot of time ensuring that Unisys is to be on top of those trends and can help government figure out how to optimize and migrate them successfully while managing investment capability.  Return To EG Front Page

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The DISA Perspective

CIO John Garing said DISA looks at infrastructure from 4 perspectives.

1. Network Defense of Information Systems Networks. Garing said the current contracts will be re-competed in two years and they are in the process how to best do that.

2. Competing Infrastructure. Garing calls this “fee for service”, where a customer comes to us and pays us for what they want us to do for them. We are moving to a platform environment in which people can bring web services and applications and have a solid back end processing storage networking environment driven by capacity on demand services.

3. Enterprise services. Garing explained these are the enablers of the information sharing program called Net Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) and the issues are how to govern those and sustain them with repeatable process that ensures funding.

4. Command and Control Framework. Garing said that as long as military services build their own command and control; there has to be some layer of abstraction above that and since we fight jointly there has to be something to unify that and that’s what we do. Systems have to work together.

The bottom line according to Garing is they have a large infrastructure to manage and they are constantly making decisions on what to buy versus what to acquire with a service.

And when it comes to competing infrastructure Garing said that DISA has been doing managed services of sorts since 2001 and now we have the processing and storage capacity on on-demand contracts. “The premise was to become faster in our ability to deliver capability to our customers.”

DISA was also looking at improving efficiency so they don’t have don’t have a bunch of servers operating at 10-15 and storage operating at 40 percent efficiency. “The concept is to share capacity burden with our vendor partners,” said Garing. “Have them retain capital asset ownership and make sure the assets on our floors of our data centers for operations and security reasons.”

Garing said the concept is working pretty well, but “we haven’t tapped the potential”.

“One would think if can do it in computing should be able to do in other aspects of our business as well specifically in the network,” said Garing. “We are considering a managed service of some sort for the network using one or several contracts.”

Garing said he doesn’t think the rules are principles are as black and white in networking as in computing. “But we want to explore some sort of managed service for capacity process business on the network side as well.”

“But if it doesn’t make business sense or give us more agility and speed then we won’t chase it,” said Garing. “We found that both the service providers and we have a hard time with managed services and performance based contract and the move towards fixed price.

“We are not trained and cultured that way,” explained Garing. “We live in a T&E environment. So, it’s hard but that’s definitely the direction, but the pendulum swings and we shouldn’t do performance based just because the policy. We should do it when it makes sense,” declared Garing. Return To EG Front Page

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August 2008 • Volume 6 • Number 8
 

Wanted: Managed Services

Can an agency afford to own its entire infrastructure anymore? There are times when it makes business and financial sense to let an expert manage portions of your infrastructure – especially your network infrastructure.

That trend is not lost in GSA’s John Johnson who has seen a growth of managed services beginning during the FTS 2001contract and continuing with Networx.

“In the latter years of FTS 2001, 30 percent of customers operate in a managed service environment,” said Johnson. “Now it is 60-65 percent. We see a strong trend towards managed network services and I think that trend will be supported as our customers obtain greater confidence in industry’s ability to deliver on the strong SLAs that are embedded in the contract.”

What is interesting to Johnson is how sophisticated some of GSA’s customers have become in this environment and that GSA is attracting new customers.

“We are getting a lot of DOD play and Intel community because I believe that everyone is recognizing how hard it is to afford to own their own infrastructure,” Johnson told listeners.

Tom Simmons said Citrix looks at managed services from two perspectives. “As a solution/technology developer/provider, we deliver the service whether it is managed or owned.”

“As a user of technology, it becomes more of well how can you define your requirements and how well can you meet those requirements at a cost based on the available capabilities,” said Simmons.

Cisco’s Gary DePreto said that Cisco is seeing a worldwide change and that managed services clearly is outpacing traditional purchases by end customer. “That’s more than double the rate of growth than traditional purchase cycle.”

“We see as success criteria are agencies that understand requirements and have a vision for their architecture,” explained DePreto. “That’s needed to be successful for any model. Those who can articulate great vision of an architecture and infrastructure they want for their agency to support those services that they need, those are the ones who start with business requirements to better find the RFP requirements and SOW requirements.”

Ed Vaccaro said that Unisys has been doing managed services in federal government for quite a few years, including the TSA and DHS headquarters efforts for the past 6 years.

“The interesting thing we are seeing is when managed services were first been developed for enterprise, it was a one size fits all. You get what providers bring. We’ll try to match requirements but will be 90 -10 thing.

You have to there is a lot of give and take and understand the requirements and what you want out of this. Now we are seeing hybrid models and make people feel more comfortable with it as we move forward,” said Vaccaro.  Return To EG Front Page

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August 2008 • Volume 6 • Number 8
 

Infrastructure Challenges

The vision is not as easy as technology said John Garing who also urged changes to the way we buy things and the way we operate.  “Right now we buy agency by agency; within DOD it is service by service, command by command. There is an ownership issue. And then you do you define enterprise. Is it a base? A command? The whole DOD?

“The biggest problem is money,” Garing went on. “One, we don’t fund things as an enterprise. In DOD the services have the money with the enabled command capability and the money given to DISA is to pay back to services to implements modules of service. It’s not hard from accounting point of view, but hard from ownership and cultural point of view.”

Garing also explained that requirements mean that managed services are paid with operating dollars. “Programs have procurement dollars, R&D and T&E dollars. It’s hard to get those dollars converted to operating dollars,” said Garing. 

GSA’s John Johnson said the first challenge to be overcome is having a vision and direction in terms of something that is articulated in a concept of operation that describes how agency wants to operate.

“This is a cultural change, moving from old to new. The technology is easy in my view, it’s the vision the direction and aligning toward some operational environment or statement saying this is how we want to operate in the future,” said Johnson. “This is difficult. There are a lot of rice bowls in any agency and getting everybody around the table to discuss what they want to accomplish this is the most difficult thing to accomplish.

Unisys’ Ed Vaccaro said the most difficult challenges are perceptions of what customers want when they go in. “If the agency is not in agreement, then you have forces working against you and the chances for success go down. Now you are fighting keeping the agency on the path they said they want to be.”

“The biggest part we found is you have to work the relationship and understand where the issues are and focus on resolving them so the program continues to move forward successfully.”

The interesting thing is we are working with relatively new --30 or 40 years -- if we were doing electricity today people would want to talk with the designers, but since it is been around a long time.

Cisco’s Gary DePreto agreed that technology is the easy part. “What excites industry is to share that vision of innovation with the agencies; give them a taste of not what’s to come, but what’s here today, how do we do that?”

“Whenever you go to a managed model, efficiencies are gained by common infrastructure and common architecture that is shared across sub agencies,” said DePreto. “The agencies that do it most successfully do have tighter control of that commonality to gain those efficiencies. Sometimes it takes a leap of faith to pool funds and resources to adopt a common infrastructure; but those are the ones that are most successful.”

Citrix's Tom Simmons also agrees. “My overall perception of challenges is not the technology, not so much the culture, it is really not even the procurement process, it is the size and the nature of the folks who get involved in the decisions to modernize an infrastructure.”

Simmons compared the relative ease of doing a reorganization in industry where we have one CIO, one CTO and they convince the Board and we go forward. .

“In government, some of great ideas of visionaries, to get it understood, accepted and adopted within and across multiple groups -- and then have Congress as a board of directors and wants its say in oversight – it becomes an incremental process.”  Return To EG Front Page

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August 2008 • Volume 6 • Number 8
 

Infrastructure’s New Tools

John Garing said that when he talks to counterparts in private sector, it is about the speed of change and even if we aren’t deploying it, it is being deployed all around us.

“We can’t control it and we have to focus the energy and the power of Web 2.0. We have to find a way to bring this stuff into the environment; to equip the young people who are being recruited to work in the military with tools they are used to having at home. It’s hard because the acquisition process, though it has flexibility, it is very stodgy.”

Collaboration tools are here today and they are very easy to use.

John Johnson said that GSA puts together contracts that evolve with time as technology evolves and techniques or processes change. “Our contract are agile enough to embrace that. When you think about Web 2.0 from an operational perspective, I think about the ubiquity of the network and that government needs to leverage that ubiquity. So how do we protect the information that rides on that network while we embrace that ubiquitous environment?

Tom Simmons calls the capabilities of web 2.0 and the underlying capabilities a tremendous opportunity to do a whole lot more.

“We are learning it from our kids,” declared Simmons. “Look at capabilities of Mu Space and You Tube and what the Intel community has done with that concept for collaboration. You wrap the critical security component around it and you take the new best practices of what people are doing out there and pushing the envelope of implementation of the technology and apply that to solve problems in unique ways.”

The challenge is keeping with the vision of where we want to be said Simmons. “From a Citrix perspective, our vision with a ubiquitous network with connectivity is: instead of carrying your work environment around on lockdown laptop or going to office to access it that way, your work environment is going to be hosted and then won’t have to worry about which network you will be on and the security policies I follow based on what I’m on.”

If the work environment is hosted and if security practices are the same no matter where you are. And you take the human element of security breaches out it because it’s in the system, then the next leap of faith is can it become a managed service? Can a Google do that?

Unisys’ Ed Vaccaro said concerns about performance of moving around large volumes of information have been solved.

“The focus is around at looking at information itself. Instead of building containers to secure it, we need to find a way to secure the information by itself and make it safe and manageable, with confidence in its integrity and its veracity, where it’s been and where it’s going who has it; and the person has it authorized and won’t be sending info somewhere where it shouldn’t.”  Return To EG Front Page

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Infrastructure Visions

Ed Vaccaro, Unisys said his vision starts with getting people access to information anytime anywhere with the understanding that technology is going to introduce all kind of different ways to work with information.

“Our challenge is to find ways to integrate that and make is useful in the context of what we do in government,” said Vaccaro. “The big step is to figure out now how do we integrate it in a way that leverages human behavior and doesn’t work against it and make it work the way people work. Make it second nature to them so we don’t have to constantly train them but it is second nature.”

Citrix's Tom Simmons said that the Citrix vision is about a model. “The analogy we use is: the consolidation of data centers is following a delivery model. If you look at Direct TV as a means of consolidating content, consolidating capabilities and then delivering that over available infrastructure, they use satellite.”

“Applying this to government there is no limit as to media and transport. By packaging your critical information up in a Data Center and making it available for delivery to your remote device. That is the vision that Citrix has for infrastructure in general and for government as well. Package everything up for delivery, secure it, and make it available to people regardless of how they want it.”

Gary DePreto of Cisco sees a real transformation for the citizen and the IT end user experience. “I keep coming back to anytime, anywhere anyplace, seeing those services delivered in automated fashion where end user needs very little interaction to get something out of the service. The end user experience becomes very simple.

GSA’s John Johnson hopes to see is greater collaboration at the federal, state and local level using managed network service, a hosted work environment type of approach with an emphasis on virtualization and cloud computing and the ability to operate in a COOP environment.

“All of the things necessary for agency missions and programs of redeeming social value such as the environment,” said Johnson.

“I hope to see a governance structure to keep pace with this environment. A lot of work needs to be done to public infrastructure to get us to greater cooperation. There is still a need for stronger government/industry partnerships and we need to address supply chain issues.”

John Garing put a punctuation point on what was said.

“In our particular experience, we need to be able to deploy a Warfighting force wherever in the world and enable it to connect, share and collaborate as it sees fit for its mission, not for something that is prescribed for them,” explained DISA CIO John Garing.

“It’s all about the platform and the cloud and the hosted work environment. We need to provide the hosted environment, the cloud, so people can work from wherever they are.”  Return To EG Front Page

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