By Geoff Fein
The Marine Corps Enterprise Information Technology Services (MCEITS) is working a number of challenges from establishing information technology (IT) service on the battlefield to implementing netcentric warfare, all while trying to keep up with the pace of technology change, according to a Marine Corps official.
Additionally, MCEITS is anticipating initial operational capability (IOC) of its common IT architecture effort by the end of fiscal year 2010. “The initiative will align Marine Corps IT resources to create an enterprise-wide environment of shared IT services that are reliable, secure, efficient and responsive,” according to the service.
As the services move toward wiring the battlefield, establishing IT services, particularly in a dispersed battlefield, presents a few challenges, Maj. Ross Monta, assistant program manager for MCEITS, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“Number one, connectivity is very hard on a battlefield just in general, but for enterprise IT services it gets even more difficult,” he said. “You can’t lose connectivity if it’s synchronous collaboration because as soon as you lose that you lose everything that is involved…all the history files go away except for the one server that maintained those. That’s one of the bigger challenges there.”
Another challenge is with deploying commercially available IT systems on the battlefield, Monta said.
“COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf-technologies), which is the preferred method (in government acquisition), isn’t made for that kind of environment. To take a COTS piece of gear and put it in a place where you have zero bandwidth most of the time and it keeps dropping, it just doesn’t function well that way.”
But companies are willing to work with the Marine Corps to find solutions that do work, Monta noted.
“Obviously, the government is not the biggest procurer of most of these applications, but these companies do like to come in and talk to us and get information on what would make us willing to get their product and put it in these environments,” he said. “They will come in and work with us extensively to figure this out. In today’s environment it is actually getting easier to get [companies] in the door.”
And IT companies can reap some benefits from developing systems that are applicable to the Marine Corps, Monta added.
“Like it or not, most people are moving to mobile offices. The lessons learned [that companies] get from the military…they can give that to people that have mobile offices. So it actually benefits them and the military in certain instances,” he said.
Another challenge is implementing netcentric warfare (NCW). According to Monta, one problem is that NCW is hard to define.
“If you really look at the definitions of it, they are not really clearly defined as to what [NCW] exactly means,” he said. “It’s very broad.”
As the Marine Corps is trying to develop synchronous and asynchronous collaboration tools, a set piece of gear–a COTS application or a government-off-the-shelf application (GOTS)–has not been set in place, Monta said.
“So to go out and procure something or develop something, we can do that and it can be a service centric, netcentric solution,” he said. “But if you go with COTS or GOTS, then to get it to work with something that another service uses in the same theater we may be in, makes it very difficult because those bridges and gateways are not developed unless you pay somebody to develop a custom gateway.”
Different services have different limitations on stuff like that, Monta added.
“We do look to hire DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) and what they are doing in these realms, and then we try to pull those applications and services through the MCEITS enterprise and push them to the tactical edge if we can,” he said. “If not, we try to develop or procure that same system and either modify it with the vendor or just make it work in our system at the lowest echelon possible. Maybe the trigger puller can’t use this service, but maybe the regimental or division commander can, and that’s where it is really needed to be…and we can get it to the level to be used efficiently.”
The Marine Corps is moving along with its effort to establish a common IT enterprise, Monta said.
“Slowly but surely we are moving along. Our program, in general, is to consolidate the IT infrastructure of the Marine Corps for the enterprise applications out there, so that we have a central location that is managing these things and we can provide services from the Marine Corps side to the lower echelon of the Marine Corps,” he said. “That’s what MCEITS is trying to do for the Marine Corps.”
MCEITS is expecting to have initial operational capability by the end of FY ’10, Monta added
“The premise behind MCEITS in hosting enterprise applications for the Marine Corps is the customer will come and we will figure out what they need for their application to be hosted with us,” he said. “So that their service to the end user of their application will get the same service they currently have with them. So we will have service level agreements with the application owners…at the MCEITS level.”
The end user should see no difference in what happens for them, Monta noted, but the Marine Corps as a whole will see a difference in service level agreements with all these customers.
“It’s all being centralized, managed, and understood and the level of service should actually go up because it won’t be based on individual commands trying to maintain equipment they don’t have money for. The equipment will be maintained and refreshed on a recurring cycle.”
As MCEITS moves the service toward a common IT enterprise, one of the issues MCEITS will have to stay on top of is the rapid pace at which both hardware and software refresh. “That’s a very difficult thing, especially with the hardware,” Monta said.
“One of the things we are looking at to mitigate that issue is virtualization. If we have virtualization on this hardware, we can pretty much separate the software layer from the hardware layer. Then we can become agnostic to what the hardware really is on the bottom,” he said.
That way, as the Marine Corps changes out the hardware, they don’t have to use a specific vendor.
“Then we can run the software on top of that virtual appliance, so that’s one of the things we are trying to look at,” Monta said. “Not everything works into that virtual environment, but it is a way forward so that the hardware refreshes don’t create a complete rebuild of the entire architecture.”
The Marine Corps has its own contracting offices for buying hardware and software, Monta said.
“One of the ways the Marine Corps gets its hardware is called the Marine Corps Common Hardware Suite. It’s actually a program of record inside the Marine Corps where you put your requirement in and they have BPAs (blanket purchase agreements) with vendors,” he said.
The agreements are pre-negotiated so the Marine Corps gets the best price on the hardware with those specifications, and multiple vendors compete for that, Monta added.
The Marine Corps tries to avoid asking vendors for specific hardware that might be unique to the service, Monta added. “Especially [with] COTS-like vendors.”
On the software side, the Marine Corps asks for software assurance. The service pays a maintenance fee; that way if the software is upgraded the following year the Marine Corps doesn’t have to buy the software again and incur a giant fee, Monta said “So we do try to make sure we don’t get out done by the same company one year after we bought the stuff.”