In a recent press release from IBM Watson, they announced that the U.S. Army’s Logistics Support Activity awarded IBM a contract to continue providing cloud services, software development, and cognitive computing, constituting the technical infrastructure for one of the U.S. federal government’s biggest logistics systems.
The 33-month, $135 million contract represents a successful re-compete of work that LOGSA signed with IBM in September 2012. Under that managed services agreement, the Army pays only for cloud services that it actually consumes. The efficiencies created by this arrangement have enabled the Army to avoid about $15 million per year in operational costs – a significant yield for the Army and taxpayers.
In addition to continuing to provide managed services as part of this new contract, IBM also will help the Army focus on:
- Improving cybersecurity by applying the risk management framework (RMF) security controls to LOGSA’s IT enterprise. RMF is the unified information security framework for the entire U.S. federal government; it replaces legacy IT security standards;
- Incorporating cognitive computing that enhances readiness by anticipating needs, and speeding application modernization.
As part of this new contract, IBM also will help the Army predict vehicle maintenance failures from more than 5 billion data points of on-board sensors that will be stored within this environment. In addition, the Army is adopting Watson IoT services and a new Watson IoT Equipment Advisor solution that analyzes unstructured, structured and sensor data directly from military assets.
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