FedPlatform.com is launched as feds look toward cloud-first policy

New online tools make it easier for federal agencies to rapid prototype software systems on the cloud

MORGANTOWN, WV, December 14, 2010 – As OMB “cloud first” unveils its new “cloud-first policy”, Virtual Global is releasing FedPlatform.com, a special-purpose platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for federal agencies that are looking for faster and easier ways to try the cloud.

An estimated $80 billion is spent annually by the federal government on information technology. Due to lengthy budgeting and approval timelines agencies are too often stuck in quicksand compared to the forward-charging pace of the tech world, and federal agencies and offices are, in the end, still left with outdated technological capacities. But a new round of structural reforms regarding the acquisition and implementation of information technology recently announced by the White House, coupled with the growth of industry-specific software-as-a-service (SaaS) development platforms, have the potential to stem the tide.

The new “cloud-first policy” directive instructs federal agencies to make it a priority to choose cloud-computing solutions. Virtual Global, a foremost provider of cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) development applications, is helping to lead the charge into what federal agencies and the White House all hope will result in the U.S. government finally getting some real and meaningful value out of its annual IT expenditures.
"The promise of cloud,” said Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, in a recent US News and World Report interview, “is it's going to enable us, for example, to implement technologies at a lower cost, much faster, and where you don't have to turn every single technology implementation into a multibillion-dollar custom project.”

The largest consumer of information technology in the world, the U.S. government lags far behind the private sector’s IT status quo and is taking on new initiatives to ensure that smarter, cloud-based IT appropriations enhance its governmental ability, for its own sake, and to work more effectively for the sake of the American people. Companies like Virtual Global -- whose core platform, in development since 1995, has been reengineered under NASA sponsorship and enhanced for security purposes under NIST SBIR Phases I and II -- are leading the pack in providing cloud-based PaaS solutions to federal contractors who provide software development services to their clients.

“We’re not re-inventing the wheel here,” said Virtual Global CEO Cary Landis. “The FedPlatform tools have already served to deploy systems for various commercial and federal organizations; including the deployment of TeamLeader, a SaaS solution used by NASA to manage nationally dispersed engineering teams for a lunar project. What we have done, though, is to make available a new platform to help federal customers more easily implement cloud-enabled software solutions.”

According the White House report Driving IT Reform: An Update, light technologies will soon be adopted, including a 40 percent reduction in data center footprint by 2015. As part of that strategy, shared solutions will be implemented as agencies will begin to shift to the cloud-first approach for the 2012 budgeting process. The shift could help consolidate thousands of federal data centers and translate into huge monetary savings, greatly improved informational security and heightened overall IT performance.

FedPlatform is leading the way in its availability to federal contractors who provide software development services to their clients. Software developers can use http://fedplatform.com as an online PaaS toolkit for rapid prototyping, building and the deployment of SaaS for their customers, on the cloud. As compared to ground up engineering, FedPlatform can reduce time-to-build, risks, and costs by more than 90%. FedPlatform provides developers with a point-and-click wizard to aid in the creation of a rich user experience, data entry forms and reports and solutions will run on Amazon EC2, and may be ported to other infrastructure providers and private clouds.

For more information about Virtual Global and FedPlatform please visit http://fedplatform.com.

About Virtual Global:
Virtual Global is a DC-area provider of cloud-enabled software platform solutions for organizations such as NASA and NIST. Products include the TeamHost™ cloud platform for building SaaS applications without programming; TeamLeader™, a project management 2.0 software for tracking and reporting on virtual teams in real-time; HITplatform.com™, a Health IT cloud based platform; and Cloudipedia, a website that brings cloud computing information to entrepreneurs. Since 1995, Virtual Global’s technologies have served commercial and federal customers worldwide with enterprise-class IT needs.

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This release was published on openPR.