Open Technology Development

The DOD is moving quickly to adopt the Open Technology Development (OTD) framework in order to access and acquire software source code for a more rapid cycling of requirements and allow commanders and program managers to better leverage IT investments across services and agencies.  Organizations in the public and commercial sectors have dramatically lowered overhead and realized millions of dollars in savings by switching from proprietary to open source platforms.  Recently, the FAA saved $15 million by migrating to an opens-source platform for traffic flow management.  Likewise, the Army Future Combat Systems program has adopted Linux as a key platform for deploying future capabilities.  The DOD already has more than 115 open source software applications operating for more than 250 purposes and found that a 900 percent savings had been realized by transferring from proprietary to open source systems.  Additionally, open source software is critical to security.  Open source software applications have been developed to uncover hostile network intrusions (cyber attacks), important developments for DOD where governance and security issues apply.  This kind of technological responsiveness is critical in much of DOD’s software which is central to its operations.

Unisys is a leader in Open Technology Development, where rapid software development is the key to DOD’s mission success.  Unisys has taken this leadership position in making OTD work.  It has the expertise and know-how of the model to deliver the desired solution the fastest.  To our knowledge, no other major Systems Integrator except Unisys has an external open source initiative underway in the federal arena.  Unisys’ leadership position in Open Source, Open Technology, and Open Systems is found in the federal and commercial marketplaces worldwide, and will help GSA achieve one of its objectives which is to reclaim DOD IT business.

Open source, open systems and Open Technology Development are key foundational elements of Unisys’ corporate strategy to realize our federal customers’ goals and complete application lifecycle agility.  Unisys is a founding member of the DOD OTD Working Group whose charter is to further the development and use of Open Technology in DOD and the Federal Government, and Unisys leads the Security and Information Assurance sub-committee in OTD.  There are not enough cleared programmers to sustain the U.S. military’s IT infrastructure where software can be leveraged across the defense enterprise.  Unisys has the required expertise, experience and bench strength (over 700 consultants with open source and open technology in Federal, and thousands worldwide) to build, integrate, test and deploy large-scale mission-critical solutions based on open source.  Unisys has developed dozens of solutions for federal agencies (US Army, US Navy, OSD, GSA, NASA, DOJ) using open source products from our alliances with open source providers described in Section A.1.2 of the Contract Plan.

Unisys invests heavily in staying at the forefront of Open Source and Open Technology Development, and is committed to certifying, testing and supporting an entire Open Source stack that includes Linux, JBoss, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and more.  Unisys solutions provide for a comprehensive, enterprise-class environment that enables federal customers to realize the full benefits of enterprise computing based on Open Source, Open Technology, and open systems.