Observations on Navy Cloud Investment in FY 2019

Part 4 in the Deltek Federal Market Analysis team’s series on cloud computing in FY 2019 at the Department of Defense.

Every Spring, Deltek’s Federal Market Analysis team takes a thorough look at the Department of Defense’s Procurement and Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation budget requests for the fiscal year to come. Using a set of keywords, FMA identifies programs that invest in certain technologies of importance to the contractor community. These technology “verticals” include cloud computing, big data analytics, cybersecurity/weaponry, and others. FMA’s analysis of the DOD’s fiscal 2019 budget request is now complete, revealing that the United States Navy intends to spend $322M on programs which use cloud technology in one way or another.

Identifying the specific cloud spend in each program is impossible due to the vague way that the Navy and DOD report budget request data. Readers should keep in mind, therefore, that the numbers presented here are the requested budgets for programs that plan to use cloud technology for a specific purpose (e.g., storage, testing, or delivering a capability, etc.). The numbers presented here should not be considered the Navy’s entire cloud budget for FY 2019. They are best thought of as a signpost indicating how and where Navy program offices intend to use cloud and the potential amounts they could spend on it.

Largest Programs

The table below lists the Navy programs with a cloud component that FMA could identify arranged largest to smallest in dollar terms. The totals shown are from the Procurement and RDT&E budget requests, meaning that the work involved could be new and available to contractors if a contract for it is competed.

Summaries of Top 5 Programs

• Bureau of Naval Personnel IT (BUPERS IT) ($99.3M for RDT&E): FY 2019 funding continues the engineering of Navy legacy pay and personnel systems into an integrated, commercial-off-the-shelf, cloud hosted solution that will provide a modernized environment. Part of BUPERS IT involves standing up the Navy’s Authoritative Data Environment (ADE), a transformation initiative that consolidates multiple legacy data warehouses into a single, authoritative data hub.
• Navy Maritime Maintenance Enterprise Solution (NMMES) Tech Refresh ($44.9M for RDT&E): FY 2019 funding supports the system design, development, and migration of NNMES to a commercial cloud environment. Funding in FY 2019 will increase to reflect the scheduled award of a contract to provide a Cloud-Based Capability Integration Platform (CIP) that integrates core NMMES financial management, human capital management, digital shipbuilding, and another cloud-based COTS solution that provides Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) and Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) functionality in support of the Shore Maritime Maintenance community.
• Naval Operations Business Logistics Enterprise (NOBLE) ($37.8M for RDT&E): FY 2019 dollars for NOBLE support development efforts to transform the system into a completely software-based capability. Hardware capacity for NOBLE will come from a hybrid environment composed on CANES shipboard servers and commercial cloud environments.
• Shore Tactical Assured Command and Control (STACC) (formerly Tactical Switching) ($29.4M for RDT&E): STACC consolidates and modernizes the Navy ashore wide area network services infrastructure supporting afloat forces and shore commands. The STACC network core service offerings will provide afloat platforms with email, chat, Domain Name System, patching and C2 application hosting services for programs that need to be in a tactical environment. The hosting services include IaaS and PaaS offerings.
• Maintenance Data Warehouse/Aviation Logistics Environment (ALE) ($20.5M for RDT&E): The Aviation Logistics Environment program is the Naval Aviation IT solution delivering full lifecycle weapon system logistics and maintenance capabilities to the Naval Aviation Support Process. FY 2019 funding will support the building of an architecture that enables migration of the ALE to the cloud after requirements have been developed.

Concluding Thought

The Navy’s cloud efforts focus largely on cloud-enabling mission support and business capabilities. Data warehouse consolidation and logistics also figure heavily in the Navy’s future cloud plans. These efforts reflect the diversity of cloud-based work that is potentially available across the DOD as different military departments explore a myriad of use cases.