By Dick Stark

BMC’s annual Federal user group conference, Exchange, was held this past Tuesday at the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington, DC.  This was the first of seven global events across three continents. Attendance was good with approximately 400 customers, partners, and BMC employees in attendance Nearly 40 show attendees visited the RightStar booth. Here is a short Exchange 2019 update.

Alan Thomas, Commissioner, Federal Acquisition Service, GSA, opened the session with a discussion of GSA’s perspective as an investor, consumer, and provider of IT products and services. As an investor, GSA is a member of the IT modernization fund where congress allocated $100M for IT modernization. Agencies must apply for approval in order to receive funding. Examples of funded projects include email to cloud, legacy to modern, and shared services. Since the money must be “repaid,” agencies are forced to look at value creation, cost savings, and return on investment.

Next up NASA CIO, Renee Wynn discussed NASA’s use of cloud computing. In just a short time, NASA has made tremendous cloud progress, currently averaging $1.4M of cloud-based computing hours per month with more than 5 petabytes of data stored in the cloud.  The result: Renee claimed that NASA is now 80% cloud, with just 20% traditional on-premise. NASA cloud service offerings include SaaS solutions such as Office 365, and Box document management, and discussed a cloud success story, NASA’s Earth Observing System Data nd Information System (EOSDIS) EOSDIS provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA Earth science data from various sources – satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs. Consuming 45 petabytes of data a year EOSDIS provides data for satellite, aircraft and space missions in a easily consumable format, helping turn “science fiction into reality.”

Herb Van Hook, BMC VP and CTO, presented BMC’s new theme, “Run and Reinvent.” BMC is focused now on assisting organizations drive innovation, master modern IT, unify current with the future, and stabilize and optimize. Key BMC principles include modernization, cloud optimized, analytics, AI, machine learning, and exceptional user experience.

Bill Marion, Deputy USAF CIO closed out the conference with a discussion about IT transformation and cybersecurity. Of interest was AF Enterprise IT as-a-service (EITaaS) and the progress made with IT agility with its poster child, Kessel Run. Kessel Run is “not your Father’s Air Force.” At Kessel Run, government developers have embraced Agile and DevOps culture as the way of helping the Air Force develop software like a commercial enterprise. In hoodies and blue jeans and working at tables like at Google or Facebook, the Air Force is quickly moving IT modernization forward.