OTAs and Cloud: Hot Topics at AFCEA WEST

By Mark Wisinger, Senior Analyst

AFCEA West is the most happening event on the Navy IT circuit. The sunny San Diego weather draws a big crowd every February and it’s an excellent place to talk shop, learn about the latest Navy and Marine Corps trends and opportunities and soak up the California sun – despite the rain this year!

Here are a couple top-level trends I noticed during the conference:

OTAs are red hot
It seems not a month goes by without new OTA’s popping up. While the Navy did not announce a new other-transactional-authority vehicle, it did announce that within the next week or two, we’d see requests for cloud and networking through the Information Warfare Research Project (IWRP) OTA. We’re seeing the Navy continue to ramp up OTA usage and grow more comfortable with the OTA acquisition process.

NAVAIR appears to be the most popular Navy cloud broker
Each Navy systems command is in varying stages of maturing their cloud-broker offering for the rest of the department. But, it appears that NAVAIR’s AWS GovCloud environment is the most popular choice right now. The Navy cloud broker model is rather interesting, given the JEDI competition and DOD CIO Dana Deasy’s mandate to consolidate as much of DOD cloud purchasing through the JEDI cloud vehicle as possible.The Navy model provides more of a marketplace approach than one sole offering. It remains to be seen whether the Navy cloud-broker model will survive consolidation into JEDI – although it will likely only be a significant cloud migration challenge if Microsoft wins the JEDI award.

The Navy’s rapid adoption and willingness to employ the IWRP OTA demonstrates the value in joining these OTA agreements as soon as possible. The Navy cloud brokers are becoming increasingly popular within the department – which emphasizes the necessity of cloud-native solutions. Make sure your solutions can operate within a cloud environment – or you might miss out on future opportunities!

To keep on top of current trends in the government market, subscribe to immixGroup’s Government Sales Insider blog – one of FedTech’s 2018 Must-Read Blogs!

To learn more about other-transactional-authority vehicles, read my previous blog, OTAs are Heating Up in the DOD.