The United States Navy will only be adopting open source technologies and standards from now on, Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, announced earlier this month, and the naval services are looking forward to lower costs, rapid technological upgrades and greater scalability with this move.

"The days of proprietary technology must come to an end. We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data," he said, reported fcw.com. "We can't accept the increasing costs of maintaining our present-day capabilities."

The Navy already has cut the number of databases and applications it maintains and has reduced its networks by 40 percent, Edwards said, "...but it is not enough. We would have to double our IT budget over the next several years just to run in place."

With its shift to an open network architecture, the Navy is now expecting to upgrade its capabilities, handle increases for demand, control the costs of its information technology operations, share information across domains and provide the latest capabilities to warfighters.

Staying abreast with the latest technologies is of the utmost importance, Edwards said, noting, "The situation is very similar to that of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Because we put them in a position of always having to catch up, the mere threat of the Strategic Defense Initiative crippled the Soviet ability to continue the arms race and enabled our side to dictate terms. If we remain behind in technology, a future adversary will eventually bring terms to us." [...read more...]

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