OutSystems, provider of the industry-leading Agile Platform application development environment, announced today a contract with the United States Department of Defense to aid the Army's pursuit of data center consolidation. The deal provides the Architecture Services Division of the Software Engineering Center, part of the Army's Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM) with a license for OutSystems' Agile Platform, supporting services to deliver the first migration project and training for initial rollout to Army personnel. 

As part of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel has put in place a plan to consolidate 962 data centers by 2015. A primary component of this strategy is the creation of a private cloud infrastructure.  Motivated by this initiative, CECOM's Software Engineering Center (SEC) needed a high-performance application development and delivery environment that could function with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities.  

OutSystems' Agile Platform provides SEC with a rapid application development (RAD) PaaS solution that works out-of-the-box and is easily leveraged in the Army's new private cloud environment. Beyond being able to quickly develop new applications in the cloud, the Agile Platform provides the Army's IT personnel with the ability to quickly, safely and efficiently migrate legacy systems to the new cloud architecture.

"Rapidly migrating legacy applications to a modern, cloud-based architecture is a cornerstone of the Agile Platform's capabilities," said Paulo Rosado, CEO, OutSystems. "Even though the scale and complexity of the Army's private cloud project is quite large, the success of the Agile Platform when faced with such a challenge shows that model-driven development can effectively scale and deliver applications to allow organizations, like the Army, to fully realize the power of the cloud."

The Agile Platform's first test was a project to migrate a complex existing system to the cloud infrastructure. The selected system initially required two-and-a-half years to develop and deploy, but the efficiency of the Agile Platform is allowing the application to be re-delivered in only 16 weeks, all while adding new features including a mobile interface. The final application went to production in early November.

"The Agile Platform was the only solution we found that could provide us with the speed to delivery and platform as a service capabilities needed to power our private cloud infrastructure," said Farry Philippe-Auguste, Chief Architect at the Architecture Services Division of CECOM's SEC.    

For more information on the Agile Platform and RAD PaaS in the private, public and defense sectors, please visit http://www.outsystems.com/cloud.