OMB eyes Sept. 9 to launch cloud storefront

The Office of Management and Budget will unveil its storefront for cloud computing services in early September.

Industry and government sources say federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra is eyeing Sept. 9 at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington as the public launch of one-stop shop for cloud computing services.

Kundra, speaking at a recent conference at the National Defense University on cloud computing, would not say when the storefront would be ready nor whether what he showed during the conference would be what the final version looked like. OMB hoped at one time the storefront would be up by July 31.

"Any agency can go online and agencies will be able to say 'I'm interested in buying a specific technology' and we will abstract all the complexities for agencies," Kundra said during the conference. "They don't have to worry about Federal Information Security Management Act compliance. They don't have to worry about certification and accreditation. And they don't have to worry about how the services are being provisioned. Literally, you'll be able to go in as an agency… and provision those on a real-time basis and that is where the government really needs to move as we look at standardization. This will be the storefront that will be simple."

And based on Kundra's short time in office, many in industry believe he will push the storefront to be ready in six weeks.

To meet OMB's deadline, the General Services Administration is putting the pieces in place.

Ed O'Hare, the assistant commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service's Information Technology Services office at GSA, says the storefront will use the same technology as GSA Advantage, but will have a totally different look and feel.

"We are well on the way to developing this storefront," says O'Hare at a breakfast Tuesday sponsored by market research firm Input in McLean, Va. "It's a virtual Advantage storefront that is customized, specialized and optimized specifically for these awards we will make for cloud computing."

GSA will start stocking the storefront with vendors' offerings "soon," O'Hare says.

He says FAS will issue a request for quotes for infrastructure-as-a-service in the next few weeks. This RFQ will be on Schedule 70-the IT schedule. It follows a request for information GSA issued in May, for which it received 38 responses from industry.

"Keep an eye on E-Buy for this RFQ," he says.

A government source with knowledge of OMB's cloud plans says the infrastructure-as-a-service offerings will mainly be for low-risk services.

The source, who requested anonymity because they didn't want to get in front of OMB's September announcement, says vendors likely will be certified at the lowest level of FISMA.

GSA also issued a RFI for software-as-a-service in June. FederalNewsRadio obtained a copy of the two-page RFI, which GSA did not make available to anyone not on the GSA schedule.

Responses were due June 24 and over the last month GSA has been testing vendors' software-as-a-service capabilities. That was one of the requirements under the RFI.

The other areas GSA wanted more information on were on what software capabilities did vendors have on the schedule already, and vendors were asked to identify the special item number and contract line item numbers these capabilities fall under.

GSA defines software-as-a-service as application software, Internet and e-mail software, productivity and document management programs, business application software such as human resources or customer relationship management, and other end-user software.

GSA states in the RFI that OMB has designated it the managing partner for the SaaS initiative, but the governance is shared by more than 24 other agencies.

"Software-as-a-service is offered in a usage-based model and is billed typically per individual named or concurrent user per month," the RFI states.

GSA also states the vendor must be able to provide a user account within 24 hours of purchase.

O'Hare says another notice of some sort will come out shortly through E-Buy to describe what the next step will be for software-as-a-service.

Kundra says the third area of the storefront will be platform-as-a-service. This is similar to software-as-a-service, but includes the ability to develop, test, host and maintain applications in the cloud.

"The shift here is shifting us toward software oriented service delivery rather than technology for technology sake," he says. O'Hare says while FAS is supporting OMB's cloud initiative, he also is focused on getting more agencies to transition to Networx from FTS 2001.

Only 20 percent of all agencies have transitioned to the new telecommunications contract, O'Hare says.

He says GSA has extended the Networx and FTS 2001 overlap through 2011 instead of it expiring in 2009 like originally planned.

"Last month, with 19 percent converted, we left about $20 million of taxpayer money on the table just because we haven't converted from one contract to the other," he says. "That is $20 million a month, not a year. Roughly, $2 million for every 10 percent that were not converted."

O'Hare says GSA estimates agencies will save between 10 percent and 40 percent by using Networx.

GSA is doing several things to help speed up the transitions. O'Hare says GSA is offering acquisition and technical assistance, is trying to simplify the acquisition process and is offering to do the transition for very small agencies.

-----
On the Web:

FederalNewsRadio - Software as a Service (SaaS) GSA RFI doc

FederalNewsRadio - Kundra says government's approach to consolidation has been ill-suited

FederalNewsRadio - Google to get cloud FISMA certified as other government uses cause concern

(Copyright 2009 by FederalNewsRadio.com. All Rights Reserved.)