Navy NGEN and Cloud Computing

I spent half of today in downtown DC at the Navy Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) Industry Day.  In case you're not familiar with NGEN, this project will be the follow-on to the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) and represents the Navy's first step towards achieving a future vision of a fully integrated Naval Networking Environment (NNE). NMCI itself is the world's largest intranet 700,000 accounts.

Among other things, not the least of which was a year-long program delay, RADM Bill Goodwin, NGEN Program manager, made it a point to highlight an interest in cloud computing. 

While on the surface this may seem pretty benign, I see this statement as a strong indicator of how fast cloud computing has made itself part of the DoD's IT procurement lexicon.

GO CLOUD !!