PaaS OutSystems Helping U.S. Army Reduce Footprint, Go Cloud

In a further sign of the federal government’s willingness to move to the cloud, the U.S. Department of Defense has tapped platform-as-a-service provider OutSystems and its Agile Platform development environment to assist the U.S. Army reduce its data center footprint and go cloud.

TalkinCloud has mentioned Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel’s “Future First” policy of governmental investment in cutting-edge technologies before, and part of that is the so-called “Shared First” initiative of cutting waste and boosting efficiency by consolidating as many data centers as possible — up to as many as 962 by 2015. That’s where the cloud comes in.

Under this deal, the Architecture Services Division of the Software Engineering Center, part of the Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) will get a license for the OutSystems Agile Platform for rapid application development. It’s to be hosted in the Army’s private cloud, plus additional services for migration and the training of Army engineers. The end goal is to migrate costly legacy software to cheaper, easier to maintain cloud infrastructure.

OutSystems CEO Paulo Rosado explained this project’s hurdles and the value proposition of the Agile Platform in a prepared statement:

This partnership is already bearing fruit, according to the press release: A legacy application that took the Army 2 1/2 years to develop and deploy was migrated to the cloud in only 16 weeks, while adding new features such as a mobile interface.

I always like hearing this kind of story. Policy is one thing, but it’s always good to see a cloud service provider actually flourish because of it.