DoD has a new marketplace for the latest agile software tools

The military runs on software and many units have adopted the latest techniques for continuous delivery of secure code. One program for supporting so-called DevSecOps pipelines is known as Platform One. Platform one has launched an online marketplace at which vendors make 5-minute pitch videos. More now on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin from Platform One’s chief acquisition officer, Steven Groenheim.

Interview transcript: 

Steven Groenheim
So our job here at Platform One is really to accelerate adoption of software across the DoD, we do that in a couple of different ways, through a handful of different product offerings we offer to the community. Some force for free that we offer, and then some that have a fee for service. But really what we do is build out the entire back end infrastructure that you would need to do and start developing code in house with potentially your airman or with contractors, whatever, whoever is on your team.

Tom Temin
And do you live in the Air Force? Or where does it live in the DoD hierarchy.

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Steven Groenheim
So we fall into the DAF, Department of the Air Force, under Air Force Lifecycle Management Center. But we do support the entire DoD. And so we have customers that range from all across the different service branches.

Tom Temin
In the recent years, it’s fair to say that the Air Force has gone back to, as they say, blue coats or blue shirts actually doing coding versus the total contractor that happened maybe 20 years ago.

Steven Groenheim
Absolutely, we’ve completely kind of flipped the script and gone back to in house coding. And so we have airmen who shooters are actually doing coding for their mission requirements, as well as hiring contractors on labor contracts, who sit underneath the government lead, who then do coding and application development as well.

Tom Temin
And on in cloud, a lot of people in the government simply use their government credit cards to set up cloud accounts where they could have a place to hold their code. Platform One is cloud based, right, but maybe a little bit more organized way to to be a repository for code.

Steven Groenheim
Platform One, when it’s completely cloud based open source as well. We mostly utilize cloud one for our cloud infrastructure, I believe the entire DAF as well.

Tom Temin
All right. And is it mainly a development environment? Or is it an acquisition piece to it, because some of the tools are not there for free.

Steven Groenheim
So we kind of do both, as the Chief Acquisitions Officer of Platform One, my job is to handle the acquisition side of that pie. But we do both. So we operate in a very unique space within the DoD, and within the DAF. We have core funding, obviously allocated for Congress. And then we also have what we call Customer funding, which comes in from users of party bus, which is one of our value streams and product offerings. So as government users utilize party bus for their mission requirements, there is a fee for service that comes back is reinvested into the program through either engineering support or new technologies. And that gets pushed back out to our customers.

Tom Temin
Give us a sense of the types of products that are available in Platform One. These are development tools, for the most part?

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Steven Groenheim
Our main suite of offerings that we offer to customers across the DoD comes in different layered approach. So it’s a tiered approach, depending on what you need for your mission. Mission requirements. You kind of have a tiered level approach. So there are four major value streams a week and actually offer to customers. The first one being [Cloud Native Access Point (CNAP)], which is a entry access point secure access cloud based access point, cloud native access point is the actual acronym name their. Party bus is our kind of one size fits all solutions. It’s off the shelf, it’s a pass to Platform as a Service. So DoD customers can just take Party Bus, the whole stack, and immediately start developing. That’s if you really want to focus on application development, don’t really want to worry about our security side of things. Big Bang is a more tailored approach. It’s the same stack as Party Bus pretty much, but you can pick and choose your pieces that you want. So if you have a more nuanced requirement, we will work with your teams, and you’ll be able to pick and choose what tech stack you need to actually get off your mission. And the last one is Iron Bank, the loss of this core value streams. Iron Bank is a repository of hardened containers, and then images within those containers.

Tom Temin
One of the purported advantages of the container era is that new applications, using the right containers can inherit security controls and security measures in them, such that agencies can speed up the process of getting authorities to operate or even developing authority to operate that’s there from the outset.

Steven Groenheim
That’s a major advantage. We also provide bodies of evidence called as SBOMs to nutrition labels to basically sell government users what they’re seeing within their containers that they’re pulling from our bank. So we go into detail, providing that information is just another layer of security. And another layer of assurance the government customers can use.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Steven Groenheim, he’s Chief Acquisition Officer at Platform One part of the Air Force. Now there is a new online marketplace with kind of like mini TED Talks. Tell us about that.

Steven Groenheim
Yeah, so we’re very excited about this. And this is where I kind of stepped in as chief acquisitions officer here, Platform One. So basically, what we’ve done is in the past, Platform One, similar to how we offer in a very agile approach to software development, and giving our cut decentralized way of providing a service across the DoD, we want to do that on the acquisition side as well. So inherently, what we’re doing is providing contracting as a Service Task model, if you could. We are developing a web based marketplace that’s going to be housed with post competition video solutions from all different kinds of software vendors, government users will be able to access this website, they’ll be able to do market research on the platform itself, go through search through filter through exactly what they’re looking for from a software perspective, and then have access to post competition solutions. So you can go directly to these vendors, start negotiating the contract terms, data rights, clint structure, whatever it may be. But we’re basically cutting the procurement lead time for source selection for new software requirements, from 120, 160 days, down to under 30 days. Really keeping pace with our adversaries and keeping pace with additional new technologies that come on board.

Tom Temin
Why not just go to a regular government wide or military wide IDIQ with multiple awards, so that people can go straight to the task order.

Steven Groenheim
Inheretley, that’s what this is. You’ll be able to make purchase orders directly off the marketplace, we utilize, we’re calling a combining and stacking of acquisition authorities. So the two major authorities that we’re using are the authorities under a broad agency announcement for our Part 35. And the commercial solutions opening which is now into the DFARS, but was in the last NDAA by combining those two requirements and all the competition that has to happen under those two authorities, you can get after a lot of really cool requirements. And you can word a lot of different contracts off those. The reason that we wanted to move away from doing a large IDIQ or Mac type contract, was because using this model, we’re allowed to keep our solicitation open for the entire fiscal year, and continuously have proposals and evaluations on proposals every 30 days. So a vendor might try to get onto the marketplace, put in a proposal, put in their five minute video pitch, might be deemed not selected for that round, we give them immediate feedback, and they can submit for another round in the next 30 Day pool. So because we’re using that approach, we can continuously onboard new talent and new technologies every 30 days. When an IDIQ, it’s a whole other process for onboarding to an IDIQ.

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Tom Temin
So that means a given vendor may not have any requirements that it can meet this month. But it’s there kind of on ice. And if that requirement should come up next month by some coding unit, then it can be added?

Steven Groenheim
We keep pace with technology and at the same time keeping pace with adversaries too. Acquisition needs to move at the speed and pace to which we can keep pace with our near peer adversaries, especially moving into a global competition standpoint.

Tom Temin
And it sounds like these are all different types of acquisitions, because there’s a lot of other transaction authority going around for prototyping. Is there any play for that hear.

Steven Groenheim
Absolutely. So you’ll be able to award OT’s off of this vehicle as well. It’s 10 USC code 421 and 422. As well, as previously mentioned, the authorities under the CSOs and BAAs.

Tom Temin
So you’ve got the waterfront covered there, pretty much.

Steven Groenheim
We do, we got pretty much everything covered. Whatever you’re looking for, from an acquisition standpoint, whatever your mission requirement will be, from a software perspective, the marketplace should be able to help you out. We would love it for it to be the first place you go when you start your market research. Because from an acquisition standpoint, in my opinion, there’s nothing that can work faster than this.

Tom Temin
And do you help vendors with their pitch videos only in the sense that they have some comparability of what they’re delivering. That the buyer can compare vendor A to B to C, and also that there’s some production value such that they’re worthy of being viewed, if you will.

Steven Groenheim
Yeah, absolutely. We give immediate feedback to vendors and they can request feedback at any time for their video pitches, whether that’s before they submit or after they submit, and whenever they would like to resubmit too. As for government customers, you’ll be able to view all the video pitches on the marketplace, you’ll be able to do your market research and compare. You also have filterable informations. What focus area? What software focus area do they submit against? Did they submit against container hardening, penetration testing, pipeline security, micro service, whatever it may be, what do they submit against? You also be able to view their security clearance whether their application is ATO or FedRAMP. So we have a lot of different filterable. The analogy I’d like to make is, if you were going to Amazon, and you wanted to search for products that were just prime day shipping, and you could filter by those products, will have filterable choices on there to reduce the burden of doing your market research. Because right now, we’re expecting hundreds, potentially hundreds of video solutions on our marketplace over the course of the next couple of months.

Tom Temin
And what about the licensing control issues to make sure that you have enough licenses for the people that may want a product? The government sometimes gets into the situation, whether it’s under licensed or over licensed either way, they’re spending too much now, where they can get caught and fined later on by vendor.

Steven Groenheim
Licenses, in general was something that we want to get after, too. So we have one of our strategic focus areas on the marketplace will be licensed procurement and management. So we will be working with vendors who not only can come in and help you with your procurement of licenses, but also your management of licenses. And hopefully, we can get to a state where you can go directly to an OEM and purchase licenses directly from them. In terms of licenses to use the marketplace, we will not have a cap. So there will be no fee for service for government users. There’s no cap to the amount of people who can come on in use the marketplace, as well as from an acquisition standpoint, there’s no ceiling for the marketplace. So we’ll potentially have an unlimited amount of words that you can make off the marketplace for the foreseeable future without having to breach ceiling requirements.

Tom Temin
And just a final question, what about vendors that are coming in here this way? Because it sounds like in many ways, it’s a rapid acquisition type of arrangement? What if they’re also on some big, as we mentioned earlier, Mac or IDIQ, somewhere and or a GWAC? Is there any conflict potential there?

Steven Groenheim
No conflict that we see. And we will be talking with industry a lot going forward and doing AMA’s and things like that. But from my perspective, this is a win win, both for the military and for the vendors. It gives vendors, especially small businesses, a contract vehicle that they can now go out and market and sell to government users. When you’re doing your business development, you’re going out and speaking with government users, you now have a way of saying, Hey, if you want to get after this requirement, you don’t have to set up a whole new contract with us. Utilize this pre existing vehicle. And you can get after requirement 30-60 days from now. So we see that as another tool in the toolbox for vendors to be able to use in addition to their existing contracts. Just one other avenue of approach.

Tom Temin
But it sounds oriented toward the innovative small business new type of tool contractor. You don’t want a bunch of Oracle’s and Microsoft on their.

Steven Groenheim
Well we do have a place for everybody on the marketplace. And we want it to be not a one size fits all, but the almost the complete opposite. A massive amount of different solutions to get after whatever your mission requirement may be, whether that’s small business or large business, whether you’re working with defense companies that have been doing this for years and years and years, or with a new company. The whole idea for us is how do you get after technology at the speed and pace that is relevant in today’s modern warfighting environment. And we think that this marketplace is something.

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