Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra visited Silicon Valley today to provide an outline of the governments vision for cloud computing and how they plan to help cut costs and the technology procurement process.
The press event was pretty brief, Vivek took a few minutes to give an overview of the current U.S. government IT picture: $76 billion IT budget, 10,679 IT systems, 300 million customers, 1.9 million federal employees.
The first step in this movement is the launch of the Apps.gov website. This site is meant to act as a portal and central repository of authorized cloud/SaaS based solutions that meet certain criteria of the government. This is a great initial step to speeding up not only the acquisition of software but also the on going management and upgrade costs that are involved.
The site breaks things down into four main groups of services/applications with Business Apps, Social Media, Productivity and IT Services. Some notable vendors on the list are Salesforce.com, Google Apps, general Microsoft, Adobe, UserVoice, Slide Share, and a hand full of others. The IT Services section is all TBD and we will know more as the Gov’t vets some of the offerings.
For a government project having only been launched in March this Government Cloud Computing initiative is moving along at a rapid click so far. Kundra warned that audience today however that this will be a long ongoing process that will take up to a decade to fully mature.
Google was, of course, in attendance at the event. Afterwards they did a little press huddle and Sergey showed up to talk about Google’s role in the governments use of cloud computing. Overall, it nothing particularly significant; they pretty much announced that they are working towards something that might turn into an approved offering sometime next year.
The government effort is definitely something to keep an eye on not only from a cloud computing perspective but overall technology policy as this will drastically change the landscape of how a large section of the government utilizes and implements software.
I wasn’t selected to ask my initial burning question which is "What role will Open Source Software play in the Governments cloud initiative?" Seems that if they are trying to reduce costs and time to implement that open source should play a key role especially given the fact that all major public cloud providers build on top of an open source stack.
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