There’s a first time for everything. On the final day of the DISA Customer and Industry Forum 2011, a first-ever panel of the chief information officers from the four branches of the military provided industry representatives with a look at the challenges they face in providing enhanced digital technologies to the warfighter.

Pentagon CIO Teri Takai she began the panel by asking LTG Susan Lawrence, USA, chief information officer G-6 with the Army, to offer an update on the Army’s migration to enterprise email. That migration was delayed this past Spring as Army IT dealt with unanticipated technical problems with the migration.

Offering a preview of her speech next week at the LANDWARNET conference in Tampa, titled “The Network of 2020: Powering America’s Army,” Lawrence emphasized that the the transition to enterprise email had nothing to do with email as an application, per se. Rather, she said, its about “common identity management–so that I can take my [common access card] anywhere in the world, to any government computer, and the network will recognize me.” Lawrence also hinted that the next 24 months will be critical to the Army successfully completing migration to enterprise email, and added that other goals include addressing data storage as well as how the Army collaborates with other services to fight. She said the final goal, what she called “enterprise collaboration services,” is expected to launch in the next 60 days.

Lawrence said that since March, they’ve moved more than 90,000 users to enterprise email. She explained that in the process of the migration, she and her staff uncovered a “dirty” network: “We found firewalls where there shouldn’t have been firewalls. We found software that couldn’t talk to other software. We’ve had to come in and bring in a team to just clean up the network.” They expect to add 10,000 more users next week and test their servers again, she continued, and if things go well, they will proceed with their plan to continue adding about a thousand staff each week.

On the question of cloud computing, Lt. Gen. William Lord, USAF, chief information officer for the Air Force, says he would be happy to migrate some of his service’s mission critical applications and data storage to what he called a “device-agnostic” cloud. He said that could be a private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud. Lawrence said that on a related note, the key to successful cloud computing would be the successful development of a common operating environment, one that presents a consistent, but fully capable and fully secure computing environment to the end user no matter what kind of device they bring to the battlefield. Brigadier General Kevin Nally, USMC, Director, C4 and CIO of the Marines, insists that any cloud computing environment be able to operate in the “most austere” environments in which Marines normally operate.

Nally also generated some interesting dialogue when the conversation turned back to the seemingly innocuous topic of email domain names. Both Lawrence and Vice Admiral Kendall Card, USN, felt it best that all the services unite email addresses under the .mil internet domain. But both Lord and McNally insisted that their services, for reasons of pride and other considerations, would not stand for losing their usmc.mil or us.af.mil email addresses without some additional discussion.

Nally noted that the perception of some of Marines involved in information assurance changed when he began referring to what they do as cybersecurity; in some cases, he said, “they now refer to themselves as ‘cyberMarines’,” drawing a laugh from the crowd.

And, making a pitch for more shared IT services among the branches, Lawrence related how two services sharing one air field in Italy, had inadvertently laid separate fiberoptic networks at the same field, and several weeks later, yet another service proposed laying yet another separate fiber network around the same facility in Milan. “Stop the madness!” she quipped, adding, “In the future, we all need to say, who’s the EA (enterprise architect) on a network, and fall in.” She received a standing ovation from the government and industry representatives in the audience for that.

John Chambers, CEO of internet router manufacturer CISCO, told the DISA Customer and Industry Forum in Baltimore yesterday that “Collaboration will be the productivity tool of the next decade.” Generally, its tough to anticipate what challenges and opportunities will present themselves five years from now, he continued.

Several years ago, for example, his company designed and built one of the first routers capable of handling one million telephone calls per second. In the first year, they sold only seven, with many people wondering what you would use such a device for. Five years later, he said, they had sold over 5,000.

Today, Chambers said that much the same thing is happening with other media, and as a result, CISCO is now making routers that are capable of handling as many as 500 video feeds simultaneously. Chambers said that because the trend is toward more and more video streaming from everything to individual PCs to mobile devices, his firm designs all their products to be able to handle video in one form or another.

Because all information is digital, every device now attached to the network, including popular new mobile devices, are network nodes, Chambers explained. In the near future, all such devices will have security built in, and also will take advantage of “intelligence in the network” to help secure all such devices. And the new environment will be one in which “security is not an option.” Because of improvements in both hardware and software, Chambers envisions improved security and reliability across the enterprise environment.

Products, he said, need to be designed to work together and easily address business demands, and at the same time be able to adapt to new technologies still on the drawing boards. He also considers cloud computing “the most network-centric architecture ever,” which he said will enable most, if not all, of the collaboration capabilities envisioned for the the future.

Imagine, if you will, the head of the Defense Department’s top IT organization, going from one exhibit hall booth to another at a trade show and saying “I need ideas!”

Lt. Gen. Carroll Pollett, USA, said that’s just what he did Monday night as the 2011 Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Customer and Industry Forum opened its Technology Showcase at the Baltimore Convention Center.

DISA Director Pollett told reporters that he and his senior staff decided on what he described as a “shotgun start,” on their first tour of the exhibit area.

“We just kind of worked the room, in terms of telling industry that we were interested in what they were doing,” in the areas of digital communication technology .

“I think I got through two rows,” of exhibitors, said Pollett, adding, “I do think it’s important, if you’re going to take the time to engage with people, to take the time to listen to them and hear what they have to say.”

Having DISA senior leadership listen to the contractors who create the hardware and software that allow it to manage the military’s computer networks – and vice versa – is the primary reason DISA has been holding these conferences for the last several years.

In a wide-ranging speech opening the conference, Pollett noted that in the past six months, the U.S. military has found itself supporting as many as six simultaneous operations, each different in scope, each making different kinds of demands on the Pentagon’s information infrastructure, and each providing different “lessons learned.”

In describing the military response to the Japanese earthquake, for example, Pollett said that “capacity is not enough,” describing the ample bandwidth of network connectivity available to U.S. forces, but ultimately finding themselves stymied by the extensive damage from the tsunami and the later quake.

“If you don’t have the diversity (of technologies) to complement capacity, then you truly do not have resilience, and without resilience, you can’t assure survivability,” he stated.

In Iraq, where Pollett discussed the transition to Iraqi security forces taking over from departing American troops, the challenge has been one of providing network connectivity transitioning from “fiber/terrestrial” to satellite delivered broadband, supporting not only U.S. agencies like the State Department, but other coalition partners.

Pollett noted that escalating cyberattacks against both public and private networks this past Spring made cyberspace the sixth “operation” that was handled by DISA and the newly created Cyber Command.

Pollett also noted initiatives that other military services have initiated to explore better ways of using information technology. The Army has been the lead service in moving military email away from servers sitting at Army bases worldwide to “enterprise email” located in the cloud.  The Navy has been using Microsoft SharePoint to better share information at its many ports globally in a model dubbed “enterprise service centers.”  The Air Force, he says, is developing the service/application environment as a platform, prompting a service-wide review of every software application.

Returning to his entreaties to industry representatives in the audience, Pollett urged them to help him and his DISA staff solve challenges in the areas of mission assurance, cyber readiness inspections, mobile operations, and coalition information sharing.

The DISA Customer and Industry Forum continues at the Baltimore Convention Center through this Thursday.