DISA Launches 5 Cloud Tests, Warns On Industry Consolidation

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http://breakingdefense.com/2014/08/disa-launches-5-cloud-tests-warns-on-industry-consolidation/



DISA Launches 5 Cloud Tests, Warns On Industry Consolidation
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on August 22, 2014 at 10:53 AM

FORT MEADE, MD: “Remember the peace dividend we took in the Clinton years in the ’90s? Welcome back,” said Douglas Packard. “That’s where we’re at.”

Some 20 years ago as defense budgets plummeted post-Cold War, the defense industry consolidated, recalled Packard, acting head of procurement at the Defense Information Systems Agency. Contractors better beware once more, because budgets are tightening again: “the Department (of Defense) will, we believe, be sequestered in ’16,” he told reporters yesterday. (Note that Sen. Carl Levin, outgoing chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, yesterday made much more hopeful noises about forestalling sequestration, a series of automatic spending cuts required by current law).

So DISA, which this fiscal year will buy over $8 billion in cyber and IT products and services for the rest of the Defense Department, is looking for every opportunity to save in 2015 and beyond. That includes relentlessly competing contracts wherever possible, rather than using single-source contracts that are currently all too common. It also includes systematically consolidating contracts where multiple firms are currently providing a similar product or service, where multiple military organizations are independently buying similar things, or where individual bases and commands have one-off arrangements that could be consolidated into a wider regional contract.

DISA is also consolidating internally. “We have over a hundred service desks scattered across the globe” dealing with different DISA products and customers, said agency CIO David Bennett, addressing contractors at yesterday’s annual Forecast To Industry here on Fort Meade. “[We] will consolidate that into one service desk for the agency… into one conceptual, virtual service desk that will support the agency products worldwide.”