“There are lots of vendors in the marketplace for Web conferencing, instant messaging and low-bandwidth chat,” says DISA acquisition executive Diann McCoy. “We’re going to encourage the vendors to continue to improve by paying them per use, each time a user selects a particular service.”

The IBM Lotus Sametime platform will be one alternative under a three-year, $17 million deal; the so-called “second-button” vendor has not yet been chosen, “but we’ll try to leverage the commercial offerings already available,” McCoy says.

That falls under the “B” portion of the ABC strategy. As for “A,” McCoy says DISA decided to adopt the successful Army Knowledge Online for DOD’s enterprise Web portal instead of developing its own. She says the decision to expand the Army platform makes sense because of the portal’s large user base and experience at scale, recovery and help desk functions.

As for “C,” DISA now does its own development only when “A” and “B” can’t meet the military’s often unique requirements. “We look at the trade-off between having less than 100 percent of the list of things needed right now or waiting while that’s developed. Maybe we can get the first increment to the warfighter quickly [via A or B], and then we work on the rest,” McCoy says.

DISA decided to go with “C” for its Network-Centric Enterprise Services user authentication system, however. “We had to go out for that because of very high security requirements,” says Rebecca Harris, program director in the Program Executive Office for Global Information Grid Enterprise Services.

There’s no specific time frame for choosing an NCES security algorithm, which McCoy says “will be consistent with DOD policy.”

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