[ Music then Applause ]
>>Good morning.
How's everyone doing?
All right, I've never seen
so many people get excited
about developing standards
[laughter] so this is great.
It's great to be here today.
I want to start with a story,
which is my first day
at the White House.
I remember walking in and
it felt like I had walked
into an environment that was
10 years behind technology.
And as many of you know, the
president had to fight tooth
and nail to actually
get a Blackberry.
And I remember my team,
unfortunately the way they
got Blackberry's was actually
assigned on seniority, the
number of years you'd been
in government and the square
footage of your office.
[laughter] And we looked at that
and said this makes no sense
if we're trying to drive change
across the federal government
and leverage the
power of technology
to transform the way the
federal government works,
so it can serve the American
people more effectively.
One of the biggest gaps in the
federal government is a gap
in technology between
the private sector
and the public sector.
Unfortunately, many of
us have better technology
at home today than
we do at work.
And frankly, what ends up
happening is when we go home,
we have access to all
sorts of platforms
and we're seeing innovation
happening in the consumer space.
Whether it's the ability to go
online and make a reservation
at your best restaurant on
OpenTable or book a flight
in minutes on Expedia or Orbitz
or any number of travel sites,
or the ability to go online
and buy a book and have it
at your doorstep within a day.
Unfortunately when the
American people interact
with their government, what ends
up happening is they're forced
to deal in an environment where
they go back 10, 15, 20 years.
And part of what we're
trying to do here as we think
about cloud computing,
if we step back
from the technology itself,
is to solve a very basic
and fundamental problem.
As you look at the mission of
the United States government
and the investments
that we're making,
$76 billion plus
is spent annually
on information technology, by
the United States government.
We've got over 10,000 systems
across multiple agencies,
and as Pat mentioned,
duplicative infrastructure,
bureau after bureau, department
after department, and we've got
over 300 million plus people
that we serve on a daily basis,
from students in high
schools that are applying
for student aid to
go to college,
to veterans that are
applying for benefits,
across the board what's
happened is this gap continues
to grow bigger and bigger.
And of course we've got the 1.9
plus million federal employees.
And if you think
about "Snowmageddon,"
that's when we realized how
big this technology gap was,
when federal employees couldn't
collaborate as a result of snow
because they were not armed with
the appropriate technology tools
to be productive,
anytime, anywhere.
And what we did in September
of 2009, we began our journey
in terms of cloud computing.
I launched the strategy at
the NASA Ames Research Center
and we've got Chris Kemp here,
who is from NASA, and we talked
about the innovations that we
could leverage across the board,
as far as cloud computing
is concerned.
And NASA was leading the
way with its implementation
of Nebula, a cloud computing
platform within the government.
And what we wanted to be able
to do was begin this journey
by being very pragmatic and also
being very aggressive in terms
of closing this gap between
innovation and technology
in the consumer space,
the private sector,
and the public sector.
We also partnered very
closely with state
and local governments.
I've been working very
closely with Steve Fletcher
who is the head of NASCIO
[National Association
of State CIOs] and the CIO
of Utah, on making sure
that we're leveraging the
public sector's buying power
and our ability to coordinate
at the federal, state,
and local level, as we think
about standards, whether they're
on security, data portability,
and interoperability.
And what's exciting here is
whether it's the way we're
structuring procurement
vehicles,
making sure that states and
local governments can buy off
of the vehicles that the
federal government has,
or thinking about the
specifications that we need
across the board,
it's a partnership
at every level of government.
Today we're going to
be releasing a report
on CIO.gov that's going
to outline 30 case studies
that highlight the public
sector's move towards cloud
computing, lessons learned,
some of the challenges
that we've faced, but a march
towards cloud computing,
nonetheless, where we're seeing
very specific tangible benefits.
At the federal level, what we've
been doing is we've also been
thinking about game-changing
approaches as far
as how we move the federal
government towards the cloud.
The data centers and the
infrastructure investments
that have been made over the
last decades unfortunately are
duplicative and they lead CIO's
across agencies to focus purely
on infrastructure
rather than thinking
about how they can
deliver better services
to the American people.
So we've embarked on a data
center consolidation strategy
where CIO's across the
federal government are charged
with coming up with
consolidation plans
that will be reflected in the
fiscal year '11 and '12 budgets
as we move towards
consolidation.
But also this is a huge
opportunity for CIO's
across the federal government,
to rethink how they're investing
in information technology.
What are the right candidates,
as far as applications are
concerned, that can be moved
to the cloud without
violating the privacy
of the American people
or compromising national
security in any way?
That work is well underway
and the federal CIO Council
is focused on making sure
that we're unearthing
the opportunities
as we move towards the
cloud computing platform.
The other important
work that's happening
within the federal government
is that we need to make sure
that we've got the
right economic model
for cloud computing.
Unfortunately, the old
model required vendors
to certify their products
with every single agency.
Imagine having to
certify your product
through hundreds of agencies.
Well you're gonna lose
your economic benefits,
both from the vendor
side and also
from the public sector's side.
So part of what we're doing
with the FedRAMP [Federal Risk
and Authorization
Management Program] program,
is we're making sure
that as we think
about cloud computing solutions,
that we're centrally
certifying these solutions
so that agency A can leverage
agency B's certification
so that we create
cross-government platforms
and that we actually
realize, not just the savings
but also the value, much faster
and that we'll also
accelerate the adoption towards
cloud computing.
But what's really important
today, as Pat mentioned,
is an area around security,
interoperability and
data portability.
We're at the very, very
beginning of this journey
and where we need your
help is to make sure
that you're collaborating and
working with us as we think
about the standards
in this space.
Because cloud computing
is going to be a platform
for innovation as
we move forward.
And what I want to do here
is actually jump into some
of the case studies
that we've highlighted
in the report that's
gonna be on CIO.gov.
So if you think about it
from a business perspective,
the SEC moved to Salesforce
when it came to thinking
about the volume of responses,
it was getting 90,000 people,
[they] go to the SEC and they
complain on an annual basis
about transactions that
are being conducted.
And in its role the SEC
unfortunately had 10-year-old
technology and wasn't really
able to serve the public,
consistent with its mission.
By moving to Salesforce.com,
what the SEC was able
to do was cut the time it took
to actually process cases,
from 30 days to 7 days.
It was also able to
move away from a model
where you had an inefficient
distributed headquarters model
where you're moving around
paper, to a single platform
where SEC officers could
track cases and complaints
across the board, upload
documents, share them centrally
and keep track of
what's going on.
And acquiring, I mean you have
these old antiquated systems
across the federal government,
it was taking up to 10 seconds
as they were going
from keystroke
to keystroke in the old world.
And now they're able to
do it close to real time.
As we look at the
Recovery Board,
Recovery.gov moved this
week to the Amazon cloud.
And one of the reasons they
moved to the Amazon cloud was
because it wanted to make
sure that it could use as much
of the capital it has to focus
on its mission, which was to go
after identifying fraud, waste,
and abuse and making sure
that that money was being used
to achieve its mission rather
than spending that money on
more hardware, more servers
and building yet
another datacenter.
Now what's interesting
about the Recovery Board is
that it's the first
government-wide system
to move to the cloud.
It cuts horizontally
every single department
in the U.S. government and
it also cuts vertically
at the state and local level.
Today we also moved
USAspending.gov
to the Nebula cloud,
which is a NASA cloud.
And that also is a
government-wide system
which cuts horizontally
and vertically.
If you look at the state of
Utah, under the leadership
of Steve Fletcher, it's
moving toward a model
where they're leveraging
both private clouds
and private sector, or
leveraging consumer clouds,
to make sure that they're
focusing heavily on saving money
from the challenges
that they face as far
as the budget is concerned.
So they're gonna be able
to, and they're 70 percent
of the way through, by the way,
they're gonna be able to go
from 1800 physical servers that
they're responsible for managing
and running and operating,
to 400 virtual servers.
And Steve Fletcher and his
team are projecting $4 million
in annual savings out of
a $140-million budget.
But what's really
interesting here is
at the state level what they're
also doing is they're providing
these services to
local governments.
Now in the state of Utah,
you're able to leverage
across the board, a platform
at the state, local level.
Imagine the possibilities at
the federal level as we think
about departments and agencies.
You look at a department like
HHS [Health and Human Services]
with CMS [Centers for Medicare &
Medicaid Services], CDC [Centers
for Disease Control and
Prevention], FDA [Food
and Drug Administration],
a number of these
bureaus being able
to leverage potentially common
platforms across the board.
Look at what's happening
in Los Angeles,
which moved to Google Apps.
Randi Levin the CIO there, one
of the chief reasons for them
to move there wasn't
just cost savings
but additional functionality.
The ability to move from
an antiquated email system
to a platform that would allow
them to collaborate via video,
instant messaging, the ability
to multiply storage by 25X
and redundancy by geographically
dispersing the information
across the board and of
course the built-in innovation
that happens, instead of having
to upgrade on an annual cycle,
literally iterative
upgrades built
into the products themselves.
Across the federal government
you're seeing opportunities
as far as cloud computing
is concerned.
At HHS, they have leveraged
Salesforce as they are looking
for the 2,000 plus users
that are going to be focused
on electronic health
records implementation,
a community of users nationally
in six weeks, rather than going
through years of
development and planning.
They will provide
service immediately.
At the Department of
Interior it's underway,
consolidating multiple email
systems with 80,000 users
and they're moving
towards an RFP [request
for proposal] process that's
gonna move towards a cloud
and leverage the
cloud computing model.
I remember the secretary
told me, when he first came
to the Department of Interior,
he couldn't send email
to all his employees.
And the reason was because
they had all these systems
that didn't talk to each other.
And they're spending a fortune
and they had a ridiculous ratio
of employees to servers, it
was something like 6 to 1.
Across the board we're seeing
a movement in that space.
Of course NASA ended up
halting a procurement
that could be worth
up to $1.5 billion
to move towards a
cloud-first policy
so they can reevaluate the
future of computing at NASA.
What we're seeing in terms
of a momentum towards
cloud computing, it's real.
It's here.
It's part of the
policy framework
of this administration.
We want to make sure
that we're doing this
in a very responsible,
methodical way and we need
to make sure the work
that happens here today,
the call to action is that
we want you to join us
so we can collaboratively
develop the next set
of standards to protect the
privacy of the American people
to make sure that we address
issues around security,
to make sure that
interoperability is addressed
so what we're not doing is
simply "webifying" our brick
and mortar infrastructure
in a cloud infrastructure.
To make sure that
data portability,
allowing the buyside, the
customer, to choose when to move
from vendor A to
vendor B, is preserved.
That's really, really
important work.
In this community, all
of you can help accelerate
cloud adoption
by focusing on standards.
And the journey into
the cloud computing
and the standards activity
begins today in the same way
that we launched the initiative
at the NASA Ames Research
Center last September.
So let's roll up our sleeves and
start developing some standards.
I want to thank Pat and Don
and the countless people
I've missed, who've been hard
at this issue for many, many
months and they've burned many,
many hours but I think it's
time now for the community
to come together and we look
to you to help us as we try
to transform the federal
government to make sure
that we're delivering
the best services we can
to the American people.
Thank you very much.
[applause]