A student could complete a full course of study for a college degree or an entire presidential administration could come and go before the cycle to award and execute one government contract is completed.

That’s why a recent collaboration between Raytheon Co. and Dell EMC to deploy new software applications for the U.S. Air Force could be a candidate for recognition in the Guinness World Records.

“By the time you’re fielding capability, it could be five years from when the need was actually identified — and in that five years the technology has probably changed,” said David Appel (pictured, left), vice president of C2, space and intelligence, Defense and Civil solutions, at Raytheon. “We were able to deploy new applications using the Pivotal Ready Architecture within 150 days and get those out worldwide to the field.”

Appel spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. He was joined by Gil Shneorson (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager of VxRail at Dell EMC, and they discussed how the collaboration generated real benefits for the military and ways in which organizations can transform without losing ground (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Changing the software culture

The contract described by Appel was part of a two-year effort between Raytheon and Dell to modernize the Air Force. A key element involved Pivotal Ready Architecture, an appliance stack that included Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware virtualization running on the Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure.

Pivotal Ready Architecture was applied to a tanker refueling process for airborne flights, which previously involved eight hours of planning on a whiteboard, according to Appel.

“It’s been about transforming the culture of the way that the Department of Defense does software,” Appel explained. “It saved over $200,000 per day in fuel costs. More importantly, it’s more efficient in protecting the safety of the flight crews.”

The Raytheon/Dell EMC collaboration also highlighted a process called transformation without tradeoffs. It’s how organizations can embrace change in areas such as application development and infrastructure management without having to take a significant step backwards.

“Transformation without tradeoffs is a big deal,” Shneorson said. “Today, every developer, every information technology person can’t wait to go and be DevOps. We offload the burden from them, and they’re freed up to do cooler stuff.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE