Grand Opening: Federal Cloud Innovation Center

As more state and federal government agencies try to catch up with the private sector in using cloud-based IT, IBM is giving them a lift. 

Just as Jeff Zients, one of the architects of the Obama Administration's Cloud-First strategy is returning to government to fix the beleagured Healthcare.gov, Big Blue opened the Federal Cloud Innovation Center  in Washington D.C. on Tuesday.

The initiative is aimed at bringing cloud computing and research work closer to federal agencies, to offer them “specialized technologies and methods for building mission-ready clouds,” according to IBM.

“A central focus,” the company said, will be working with government leaders on adopting open standards across the government, with the aim of more data and system integration and workload portability. IBM is one of more than 200 companies contributing to the free and open source “infrastructure as a service” project known as OpenStack, along with the likes of AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Intel and HP.