How Many Computer Centers?

The answer to that question may be 13, the number of computer centers operated by the Defense Information Systems Agency and none run by the Army, Navy or Air Force.

That's the take of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which chopped $75 million each from the computing budget of the three services in its version of the fiscal 2010 Defense Authorization Bill. The cut is a stick to force them "to aggressively explore increased opportunities to utilize DISA computing services and eliminate redundant, wasteful service-specific computing services activities."

The committee said that the three services' computing centers, as well as DISA's, had led to "uncoordinated, departmentwide deployment of servers, mainframes, data warehouses, Web sites and other computing services, [which] has resulted in inefficiencies, underutilization of computing infrastructure and interoperability difficulties."

This language needs to be coordinated with the House version of the bill, and I imagine the services will fight to have it removed. But, if it survives, DISA will become THE Defense computer powerhouse.

Then DISA and the General Services Administration can battle to see who can offer the best deal on cloud computing services.