Leveraging "a new model for how government does business," Platform One officials are hoping their recent agreement allowing six companies to resell two products core to the Air Force's software development effort will bolster availability, spur more DevSecOps environments and help inform whether and how other services are commercialized in the future.
Under the agreement, resellers Booz Allen Hamilton, BrainGu, IndraSoft, Novetta, RevaComm and Seed Innovations received the go-ahead to sell Platform One’s Big Bang -- an infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code package that facilitates the deployment of a custom software factory -- and container registry Iron Bank.
Joey Arora, Platform One chief scaling officer and leader of the reseller program, told Inside Defense last week the new effort, spearheaded by “a learning-focused organization,” aims to create more pathways for adaptation amid a broad customer base.
“One of the key things that we realized is, in order for Platform One to scale, we want to make the services of Big Bang and Iron Bank more available to both government and commercial customers,” he said. “And the way that we're going to do that is leveraging what happens in the commercial world. . . . We have a fundamental, core belief that Big Bang should be open source, that anyone should be able to submit to Iron Bank, but people still need help in implementing these services and understanding how to transition to a modern DevSecOps environment.”
Laying the foundation for the reseller agreement is an Other Transaction Authority that Platform One and nonprofit Catalyst Campus struck this fall. The structure means Catalyst helps manage the six resellers, Arora explained, while also spearheading work to engage industry and government stakeholders on what Big Bang and Iron Bank are. Meanwhile, the resellers provide the services to customers.
The deal facilitates the “continuous development of the technology stack that's behind this,” in addition to ongoing software improvements, Arora said, by sending “a joint investment” back to Catalyst that officials there will leverage to bolster Big Bang and Iron Bank.
“If you're continuously improving the product lines that we have, it makes it more attractive for the resellers to go out and sell those product lines to either government or commercial agencies,” he noted.
Calling the arrangement “a pretty innovative construct,” Ki Lee, vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, told Inside Defense in a separate interview last week the reinvestment model represents a “win-win” by continuously maturing Platform One and allowing users to gain value by taking advantage of those iterations.
Platform One is hoping to see each reseller collect a minimum of three customers each, Arora said, something officials believe will help “resellers get an understanding of what it takes to deliver these services” while Platform One learns “what it means to put these on contract, how the joint investment flows and what that looks like for us” and more.
Nearly two months into the effort, Arora said the focus has initially been on education, though officials have also curated “a pipeline of customers that are interested in engaging with the resellers,” though he didn’t share specifics.
Lee said Booz Allen has seen interest from industry, Defense Department and civilian customers, as well as the intelligence community. While he didn’t name examples, he said fueling the demand for software products and services more broadly is the government’s need for “agility, speed and flexibility to meet their mission and business requirements.”
“We need to move faster. We need to have flexibility, and the core underpinning, architectural tenet that Platform One enables is modularity: smaller services that we can actually orchestrate against mission and business requirements,” he said.
The initial reseller agreement lasts just six months, Arora said -- a period that allows officials to apply lessons learned about deployment to future deals. Asked about the potential for adding other Platform One products going forward, Arora said the team is “thinking about the best options to do that,” noting that decisions about whether and how to do so will be informed by the current deal.
Still, he stressed officials remain actively focused on the current endeavor involving Iron Bank and Big Bang.
Those two products, Lee said, are “the fundamentals” -- which, in his view, is why the government opted to begin with them in the current contract. Likening Platform One’s portfolio of services to the layers of an onion, Lee said the central focus, the core, is ensuring “all the capability [is] hardened” and the modular components are placed within the Iron Bank for reuse. Beyond that is Big Bang, where those capabilities and tools have been used to package up a DevSecOps pipeline.
When looking more broadly at the reseller pilot, Lt. Col. Brian Viola, Platform One’s materiel leader, said the effort showcased the team’s desire to be an agile Netflix, which came along and “flipped the entire script” on the movie market, rather than an obsolete Blockbuster, which wasn’t “agile enough to keep up with that change.”
“Many organizations suffer from the agility versus size paradigm where, as you grow in size, a lot of time you lose that agility,” he noted. “And in at least in my mind, the impetus behind the reseller model was really to try to get after that, where we can inspire diversity of thought across this entire ecosystem, we’ll leverage commercial best practices and innovation to really just steal this beyond what we have today without losing the ability to stay agile as Platform One.”
Neither Arora nor Viola, who spoke in a joint interview, ruled out further cooperative research and development agreements and other vehicles to partner with vendors and enhance Platform One’s services. But they also didn’t comment on what future deals could look like.
“We’re always looking at new opportunities,” Arora said.