Pentagon Gets Hep to IP Communications

We’re seeing very healthy attendance numbers for the VON Conference & Expo, and there’s one trend that has leapt out at me: we have a surprising amount of attendees from the military and defense sector, including representatives of several countries’ defense establishments.

There are a few theories I could venture as to why this is so, the simplest being that the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs” – a concept that’s been tossed around the Pentagon for years now, focused on improving war-fighting capability by increasing the use of information technology and integrated command-and-control systems – is based in large part on the spread of IP-based networks through the military branches.

“New tools and processes of waging war like information warfare, network-centric warfare (NCW), integrated Command and Control (C4ISR), system of systems, all powered by information technology, have led to the revolution in military affairs (RMA),” wrote columnist Sharjeel Rizwan on the Defense Journal Web site recently.

Federal Computer Week has a long feature this month on the spread of IP-based unified communications platforms across the far-flung outposts of the American military establishment. Among the more interesting developments:

The defense community is probably behind the corporate world in terms of deploying advanced networking infrastructure. “Today, what we have are islands of IP telephony in oceans of TDM,” James Reilly, chief of systems engineering, architecture and plans at the Defense Information Systems Agency, told FCW.

For obvious reasons, presence and status features are of particular utility to officers in battle zones.

As part of its Net-Centric Enterprise Services program, DISA offers two platforms for UC: the “e-CollabCenter,” based on IBM’s Lotus Sametime, and Defense Connect Online service, which runs on Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional and Jabber Extensible Communications Platform.

A pilot program for end-to-end voice-and-video-over-IP services over the Defense Information Systems Network is expected to get underway this summer, with initial deployments next spring.

The Pentagon, of course, is one of the world’s largest consumers of telecom services and equipment, and vendors like Cisco have long pitched converged IP-based communications systems to the military. It’ll be interesting, as these initiatives move further, to see whether the military sticks with traditional providers or goes with more innovative start-up IP telephony providers. I look forward to learning more in Miami in September.