Federal Innovation

By Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Microsoft Federal 

This week a few of my Microsoft colleagues attended the annual ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference (ELC) in Williamsburg, and they all came back raving about the technical innovation that’s currently taking place in the federal government.  Almost unheard of a few years ago, federal leaders today are becoming early adopters of technologies like cloud computing, and are leveraging new tools to increase transparency, facilitate collaboration and drive efficiencies to make better use of taxpayer dollars. 

To enable innovation, our focus continues to be on providing our government customers with choice.  As I’ve said in previous posts, in the world of software - choice means open standards.  Our customers aren’t interested in how software was created – they care about the value it can provide.  It’s a mixed IT world, with both open source and proprietary software being brought to bear, and federal agencies need the freedom to choose the best tools for specific needs.  To promote choice, we’ve worked extensively with developers to improve the way open source applications run on Windows.  For instance, we’ve engaged with the PHP community to ensure that applications like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Advanced Poll, WebCalendar, SugarCRM and many others run well on our platform.  The common assumption is that these applications need to run on Linux, but that’s simply not true anymore. 

Our focus is on increasing productivity for our customers, with a heavy emphasis on security, reliability and interoperability.  I do take issue with recent claims that open source applications are inherently more secure than proprietary software.  All developers have access to the same security tools and techniques, and that idea completely ignores rigorous, proven methods like our Security Development Lifecycle approach which has been statistically shown to significantly reduce vulnerabilities in our products. 

Agencies also need choices as they begin weighing the decision to transition to the cloud, which means having access to solutions for hybrid environments (on-premise and cloud).  Discussion at ELC 2009 focused on how we can continue to advance public sector cloud computing.  To  support the needs of federal agencies, we’re continuing to improve our cloud offerings like Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting, and Bing, among many others.  Solutions such as Recovery.gov hold tremendous promise for government at all levels in terms of transparency and accountability, and we are exceedingly proud that the site leverages Sharepoint Server 2007 for content management and SQL Server for data warehousing. 

It’s so exciting to see federal agencies setting best practices for technical innovation, and maintaining the fundamental role of competition in innovation.  Choice will keep public sector competition strong, and will provide government with the best tools to provide the most value to citizens.