By the beginning of fiscal 2014, the Army plans to launch a secure "AppMall" for enterprise-focused applications, according to Mary Lynn Schnurr, Army Intelligence chief information officer.

"We knew we could not continue to function in that software-focused environment," explained Schnurr Dec. 14 while speaking at an AFCEA NOVA Army IT day in McLean, Va.

Army Intelligence has begun using the National Security Agency's Ozone Marketplace for creating and distributing what it refers to as "widgets." These secure, virtualized tools can be launched all at once from a desktop or a mobile device to interact with one another in Ozone's common presentation layer, said Schnurr.

A new round of widgets in the Distributed Common Ground System suite will appear on Ozone in late January 2012. Widget-enabled biometric collection, screening and analysis on-the-go will be in initial operations in 2012, said Schnurr.

Her primary focus is building the foundation for the AppMall, said Schnurr. Army has a common operating environment architecture and is working to create common network transport, as well as a "secure framework" enabled by Army G6. The Ozone Marketplace provides a standard development framework, which Army will adopt for its forthcoming AppMall.

Schnurr said she expects the number of available widgets will increase drastically in 2013 and 2014. And with the AppMall as a centralized, enterprise application store Schnurr believes Army will give soldiers the capability they need more rapidly, in a "30-, 60-, 90-day time activity."

"We have to be creative and flexible, and we have to create these apps and widgets rapidly and be able to deploy them rapidly," she said.

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