By purchasing software for the whole service under one licensing agreement, the Air Force will save $100 million over the course of the contract, Air Force officials said.
But, the real intent of the contract consolidation is not to save money, but to improve security on the Air Force network and to protect the integrity of the valuable information that travels on it, said John M. Gilligan, the Air Force's chief information officer.
"The major driver for us is security," Mr. Gilligan said.
"Today (the Air Force has) a lot of separate contracts; the software is configured separately by each of the contracts and by each of the local installations, so we have thousands of separate configurations," Mr. Gilligan said. As many as 38 separate contracts, managed by the major commands, have been in effect at one time, he said.
Such dissimilarity between computers and networks makes it difficult to centrally manage the Air Force network, Mr. Gilligan said. While installing security patches to desktop computers today can be done automatically in some locations, in most places the work must be done by technicians installing updates one computer at a time. That method is costly and time consuming, he said.
"It takes months, literally, in most cases (to install a security patch)," Mr. Gilligan said.
In an ideal situation, every machine would be exactly the same, making it easy for network managers to discover problems, devise solutions and apply fixes, he said. The new information technology initiative aims to move the Air Force in that direction.
Once the changeover is complete, updates can be made automatically to all computers at once, Mr. Gilligan said. The decision to update or not would be centralized, and the fix would be "pushed" out over the Air Force network to every computer attached.
Centralizing computer management also means a savings in terms of manpower requirements, Mr. Gilligan said.
There are about 50,000 people in the Air Force sustaining networks, servers and desktops, he said. Through common configurations, the automatic distribution of patches and the consolidation of help desks, those people can be freed up to work on other tasks.
