The General Services Administration hopes to help agencies respond to Office of Management and Budget mandates that call for data center consolidation and the adoption of cloud-computing based services.

An OMB "cloud first" mandate requires every agency to have one cloud solution in place by December 2011 and up to three cloud-based programs by June 2012. Agencies also must shutter data centers at a rate of about 12 per month through the end of 2011 if they're to meet OMB goals about data center closure.

FierceGovernmentIT spoke by phone May 31 with Sharon Terango, project manager of GSA's SmartBUY program; Lawrence C. Hale, director of the Center for Strategic Solutions & Security Services; and Bill Lewis, director of cloud computing at GSA's Federal Acquisition Service, about GSA's response to this new federal IT environment.

FierceGovernmentIT: At a recent AFFIRM event Larry mentioned that GSA has some services that can facilitate data center consolidation and closure, but now, GSA is making those services more transparent. What is the look and feel of what GSA is doing with that? Is there a marketplace or a webpage where all these data center services are housed?

Hale: That's exactly why I brought Sharon, because that has been her project and she's the best person to discuss it with you.

Terango: We have done exactly what you're talking about. There was a data center webpage that GSA had and what we've done is we took it and updated it and made it so that you could see that our data center service offerings are cross portfolio and we try to make it so you could get a better feeling for--if you're interested in one type of service you would go potentially to one of the portfolio offerings versus another. And also what the advantage is of going from one portfolio offering versus another.

Cara Battaglini (GSA office of communications): Can you explain what portfolio offerings mean?

Terango: Right, so sorry, we have different line acquisition vehicles called GWACs [Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts]--that's Alliant, 8(a) STARS, the VETS GWAC--lot's of different GWACs that are tailored to whatever socio-economic needs you might have, but they're also tailored to complete solutions--

Hale: So, at the AFFIRM luncheon that was the area that Michael O'Neill was talking about, he's the director of the GWACs.

Terango: There you go. So, if you heard about what Mike O'Neill had to say, that's basically where you can go to get a complete solution when it comes to data center services.

So, for example, if you need to migrate your services and then find an outsourced opportunity and have the whole thing managed for you, then you would want to go to the GWAC program.

But then there's also the Networx program, which is considered a telecom program, but at the same time all of the telecom providers are now really big in the data center services space. So, if you've made the scope big enough, then you can use those same network services for your data center services, too. Or if you just want to keep your overhead simple, you could modify your contract with that particular vendor that you've gone with already for your telecom services, if that makes sense for you, and then you can get your data center services that way.

So that could be how you could do consolidation. And then there's always the Schedule 70. Schedule 70 has everything, it's just that you really have to know what you want and you have to kind of know the vendors better.

Hale: One of the challenges when Sharon started this project was that we had all these capabilities but they were expressed or displayed in a procurement language. What Sharon's group did was meet with customers, with data center owners and operators, and also met with the service providers--so they visited a number of data centers--and they became much more comfortable and familiar with the language of data center services, with the categories of data center services.

And so the most significant change is how they're presented. So across our portfolio, we've got all these different capabilities and depending upon the customer's needs different vehicles are more appropriate. But what Sharon's done is to display it on the webpage in the language of data center services.

So instead of "click here for Alliant," "click here for Networx," it's "if you need consolidation, click here." So that our customers--from where they're coming from, from what they're needs are--they can find the most appropriate capabilities to suit those needs within our portfolio. It was always there. This is just making it easier to find.

Terango: Making it more visible, that's right.

FGIT: Alright. So, we're talking about language like migration and integration and things like that--

Hale: Virtualization.

FGIT: Virtualization, exactly.

Hale: Yup, all of those.

FGIT: Perfect; that makes sense. And I know you mentioned, also, that part of that is providing outsourced opportunities so they know where things are going to go--beyond the closure and consolidation. So would part of that be your cloud offerings or is that actually in a different--

Terango: Right, that's actually on our data center services webpage as well. So the infrastructure as a service offerings, they're there as well--not to say that you can't get those by other means. But if that's the means you'd like to use, you can.

You make a very good point; there's definitely a lot of overlap and, in fact, we may be moving the data center services under the cloud services because it's all meshed together.

FGIT: Okay, great. And is there anything GSA is doing with helping agencies collect information on consolidation and closure?

Terango: Well there is a federal data center consolidation working group, and they meet once a month. So the CIOs are all very aware of what the other agencies are doing.

Hale: Yeah, and in fact, Bill works very closely with our partners in the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies and they are managing that initiative. So it's probably best, in terms of collecting information, it's probably best to defer the question to them because it's certainly not in my lane. Bill, would you agree that's the best place to direct a question like that?

Lewis: You could. I'm not sure what there is to add. They've had a number of data calls and some fairly comprehensive stuff come back in about where the data centers are and where the systems are and that's driven a lot of the cloud strategy to basically consolidate these data centers. So, is there something specific you were looking for?

FGIT: Basically, the whole idea that Vivek Kundra has said "cloud first" will be funded by savings from data center consolidation. So agencies are looking to purchase cloud services and they, so far, appear to be unable to collect metrics to see how much they'll save in order to spend in the cloud. Do you know what I'm saying? So as far as using the money from one area and refocusing it in another, it's hard to collect that data.

Battaglini: Molly, this is Cara, I think that's something we can maybe follow up with another PAO on, because it's falls sort of outside of our realm of expertise. So we can follow up after this.

FGIT: Okay. Thanks.

Moving on, I had a lot of other questions that are probably more directed to Bill. I was hoping we could chat about the different cloud services being provided right now. Infrastructure as a service, that one is being adopted right now, I understand?

Lewis: It is. So the basic positioning is similar to Sharon's. Almost any cloud service you want today is available through an existing GSA contract. And really, the contract you select to buy it is somewhat dependent on your requirements.

We have a number of [Blanket Purchase Agreements] off schedule that are either developed or in development. The one that's developed is the infrastructure as a service BPA, which basically includes three things: Access to computing power through virtual machines, access to storage services and access to web hosting.

The advantage to a Blanket Purchase Agreement off Schedule 70, like this, is that your requirements are common, defined and pre-priced. But if you had something where you didn't quite know what you wanted or you had a wide-range of professional services, one of our GWACs may be more appropriate: Alliant, Alliant Small Business, 8(a) STARS. What we let the customers do, is the requirements are going to drive the type of acquisition that is used. So, I would say infrastructure, in general, we're seeing the most demand off of that.

Moving a public-facing website, from your premise-based location to the cloud could easily be done through the infrastructure as a service contract, which was awarded last October. Our vendors are going through the process of completing some security work and we're already seeing some solicitations go out in anticipation of the work being done.

FGIT: Great, and maybe while we're discussing infrastructure as a service you could explain how that differs from platform as a service and email as a services. The email is a bit more obvious, but platform and infrastructure seem more similar to me.

Lewis: In the current NIST definition of cloud it falls into three broad categories. Infrastructure as a service is basically providing access to common computing platforms, storage and the communications into the cloud services provider--the common in infrastructure.

Software as a service is the cloud service provider is already providing the infrastructure, it's invisible to the user, and they're just getting access to an application. Email is an easy one to look at. That's software as a service.

Do I really care that it's on a particular manufacturer's server, where my email software resides? Do I really care that they may use one communication provider's equipment over another? No. What I really care about is that they're able to provide me access to email, they're able to archive it, and they're able to make changes to my email administration to meet my requirements. So that's the classic definition of software as a service.

Combine those two together, software as a service plus infrastructure services, for the purpose of either a community or for software development and there you have platform as a service.

Where we're seeing the most demand is infrastructure. Email--you've seen all the comments about that--but we see strong demand on the email. People desire to use the cloud for that common function. Platform as a service, where we've seen interest in that is around a particular community.

Take the geospatial community, they all want to share applications, customize those applications and it makes sense to give them access to that on a common platform.

FGIT: That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for breaking that down. So, for platform as a service, is that something that can be used from an interagency approach as well?

Lewis: It could. So, when I say community, I don't necessarily mean a community that's all in one agency. It's probably communities around a common interest.

FGIT: Several agencies have reported the services or applications that they will move to the cloud as part of the cloud first initiative. By my count, about 18 percent of the services identified to move to the cloud will be email. Has GSA already talked to a lot of agencies about this or do you have any idea how many plan to get their cloud email services through GSA?

Lewis: I don't know if I can give you a number, but here's what I know: When we developed the email as a service blanket purchase agreement that's currently on the street, we did this in conjunction with an interagency working group. So I don't know how many agencies, if it was 15 or 20 we had working on it, and they actually reviewed the requirements, helped us develop the requirements in many cases, and these people for the better part of three quarters of a year were meeting with us every other week to help move things along. It would not surprise me if we had interagency collaboration during our evaluation.

So, we've done this in conjunction with our customers rather than build it and try to guess what the customers want, we built it along with the customers.

FGIT: So, right now GSA has the platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, email as a service, are there any other "aaS"es, if you will, that I'm missing?

Lewis: No, that's really the three models that we have, but I can tell you, you can morph this into multiple things. Let me clarify on platform as a service.

GSA is not building a platform as a service BPA right now, and we're not building a platform as a service similar to Forge.mil for other agencies to use. But if a number of agencies wanted to get together and buy platform as a service, it's certainly within scope on Alliant and it's certainly available on IT Schedule 70.

Where you're going to see additional offerings come out is more than likely in the software as a service category. We've got email. And so what we're doing right now is laying out what's going to come next, in the next applications that people are going to want to see purchased in the cloud.

What are the general services that would come through? There's a lot of problems with financial applications, but is that appropriate for the cloud? I don't know. You know every agency might be different.

There are other applications with HR systems, maybe for collaboration systems that are more in depth, where people may need to customize. We're still weighing a number of options that I'm not prepared to talk about today. But over the next few months you'll see either requests for information or other activity come out on what we're considering to do next.

The other thing you want to keep in mind in where we want to innovate is not only what applications are going to be purchased but what's the best way to develop the requirements for the application and give our federal customers access to that as quickly as possible. That's not only a user, technical requirements question, it's also a question of how we enable that through the Federal Acquisition Regulation. There may be some things that we need to think differently on how we acquire new technology.

Cloud, keep in mind, really has two purposes. Purpose number one is to lower the cost of providing services today. Purpose number two is to provide federal customers faster access to information technology so they can either provide better service to the American people or their own internal constituents, or lower the cost.

FGIT: Would something like that be under your realm as far as providing a place for that to be discussed: Greater agility, lower cost? I'm guessing we're talking about FAR and FISMA stuff.

Lewis: It's certainly not exclusively under my realm, but I've got an interest to advocate for things like that.

My primary objective in the Cloud Program Office is to ensure that adoption of cloud service is as easy as possible and that the price that folks are paying is as appropriate as possible. So, we in federal acquisition are interested in the ease of access to what our customers want. We've got to do two things: We've got to get the requirements right and we've got to make it easy to use. And that's certainly within the scope of the cloud PMO. That doesn't mean I might not need help internally with GSA or another organization.

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