Federal app store is aiming to speed innovation

A top federal technology officer has unveiled the Obama administration's plan to embrace cloud computing, promising during a Silicon Valley appearance that the initiative will speed innovation while reducing government expenses for data centers and tech infrastructure that now cost taxpayers $19 billion a year.

Moments after federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra described the government's plans at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., executives from Google announced they intend to create a dedicated "government cloud" — a data center designed to meet federal specifications for hosting applications and computing services for government agencies.

Other local tech companies also see opportunities: Salesforce.com and several other vendors have signed up to sell cloud-based software, social-networking programs and other services to public agencies through a new Web site, dubbed Apps.gov, that Kundra unveiled.

The new site, which works in the same way as an online shopping site or app store, is intended to give government agencies easier access to cloud-based computing services available in the private sector. Cloud computing generally refers to the concept of hosting software and data on a centralized group of servers, while making them available to users over the Internet.

Since all the offerings on the Apps.gov site are prescreened to meet government procurement guidelines, Kundra said, the new site will cut red tape and make it easier for government agencies to quickly deploy the latest technology.

It's also an example of the government's effort to shift more computing functions to government and commercial data centers that offer a shared platform for individual agencies to host Web sites, store nonsensitive information and carry out other data-processing functions. In some cases, this would mean sharing resources from many underused data centers that are now operated independently by a host of government agencies.

"We've been building data center after data center," Kundra said, noting that the government now spends more than $19 billion a year on its information infrastructure. "A lot of these investments are duplicative."

As agencies have created their own data centers — the General Services Administration has eight, while the Department of Homeland Security has 23 — the government's energy consumption more than doubled from 2000 to 2006, Kundra added. He called that trend unsustainable.

Kundra, the former chief technology officer for Washington, D.C., is one of two federal officials whose jobs were created by the Obama administration to help jump-start the government's use of technology. Aneesh Chopra, the federal chief technology officer, works on policy issues for the government as a whole, while Kundra focuses on tech operations and spending by federal agencies.

Acknowledging the need to address privacy and security concerns, Kundra stressed that the move to cloud computing will be a "long journey" rather than an overnight transformation. While the administration is working on pilot projects and hopes to draw up formal standards within the next two years, he added, some military and intelligence functions will always need to be housed within "internal clouds" — data centers owned and operated by the government.

Nebula

As one model for those government centers, Kundra pointed to Nebula, an internal "cloud" or shared computing platform that NASA has been developing for various projects at the Ames center.

But he also said there are many innocuous functions that can be operated more cheaply on commercial platforms. The Transportation Security Agency recently spent more than $600,000 to set up a public blog, he noted, while thousands of people across the country use Web-based services to create their own blogs for free.

"If an individual can go online and set up an e-mail account within minutes," he asked, "why must the government spend billions" to set up comparable systems?

Existing contracts

Many tech companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and VMware, already have extensive contracts to supply and even help operate government data centers. Aileen Black, a VMware vice president who attended last week's event, said government contracts are "the fastest growing segment of our business."

She and other industry officials said they're eager to help the government embrace cloud computing. Kundra's announcement drew praise from trade groups such as the Information Technology Industry Council.

Cloud computing helps large enterprises benefit from economies of scale, said Google co-founder Sergey Brin, whose company is also seeking contracts to provide Web-based software for city governments.

He added: "The U.S. government is probably the largest enterprise I know."