DOD Marketplaces Improve the Agency’s Efficiency and Quality

Every organization needs to respond immediately to new circumstances — and none more so than the government departments that are responsible for ensuring the country’s safety. To keep up with the frenetic pace of change in technology spheres, the United States’ military branches, represented by the Department of Defense (DOD), have set up “software factories” as part of a larger effort to update how they buy, develop, and deploy software.

Software factories are systematic approaches to shorten and modernize development cycles. Each factory can have distinct pipelines and its own tools, workflows, scripts, and environments. It’s a continuous loop of planning, writing, testing, deploying, operating, and monitoring new software, hardened to security-intense DOD specifications.

A software factory usually employs Agile methodologies and adopts the DevSecOps approach that reaches for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Core components include:

• Agile practices
• Cloud-native, containerized infrastructure
• Process automation
• Infrastructure management, encompassing quality assurance and security testing

The DOD began deploying software factories in 2017. There are now about 50 of them, and more may exist in unofficial development environments.

Software factories benefit the DOD and its suppliers, helping it create high-quality software faster. Among other positive attributes, the factories create internally understood software development processes for in-house applications and far fewer wheel reinventions.

Notably, software factories also make it easy for government entities to buy commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS), using software marketplaces.

Marketplaces Make a Difference

DOD branches need to find and acquire the materials for their software factory. Software might originate from other government agencies; it also can come from a commercial product or open source technology.

The government needs to ensure its suppliers meet the requirements for a given domain and track which suppliers have the right expertise. If a critical situation requires timely response, the people in charge shouldn’t have to begin the process of vetting suppliers for planning artifacts, checklists, procedures/processes, organizational safety independence, quality assurance, and so on. They need timely access to post-competition solutions that fit the immediate requirements.

As a result, software marketplaces have become an important supply chain that enables DOD developers to crank out high-quality solutions that are readily integrated into defense systems.

Historically, the DOD followed long procurement processes based on program-specific requirements. That could result in custom-built software with long development lead times, limited scalability across other DOD programs, and workable interoperability only when it was specified at the program onset. The technologies generated often were outdated or obsolete before the program was complete.

Instead, with marketplaces, anyone in the DOD who needs COTS can find it in the repository, acquire it quickly, and use it in their applications. They can be assured that marketplace owners have already evaluated software or tools on their suitability for the task, such as security requirements. A marketplace can also ease the process of comparing similar technologies.

The procurement agent just needs to match their requirements with the options in the marketplace. The software and tools can be purchased quickly using the military’s Other Transaction Authority (OTA), so the development teams can get right to work.

Software Marketplaces Makes Procurement Convenient

The DOD mandates a modular open systems approach (MOSA) in building major defense-acquisition programs, with modular system interfaces between major systems and major system components. Marketplaces can ensure that procurement officers find options that support the necessary standards for their program.

These marketplaces take on different forms, reflecting the DOD departments’ purposes and goals. For example, the Air Force created the Iron Bank repository of digitally signed container images, including open source and COTS software, and makes it accessible to other services. Iron Bank continuously scans its content to ensure that any security vulnerabilities have been appropriately resolved. Any DOD software factory — and indeed, anyone with an Iron Bank account — can download an image from it. Commercial providers to Iron Bank can license their products to Iron Bank users separately for commercial uses. Wind River has maintained a containerized image of the VxWorks real-time operating system in Iron Bank since 2022.

Sometimes, the use case is a particular technology need, such as tools that support DOD technology goals. The Tradewinds marketplace evaluates applications’ functionality for related support, such as fitness criteria for AI, data, and digital use cases. (Only DOD employees can search for and discover Tradewinds awardable suppliers.) When the criteria match, the OTA acquisition processes speed the acquisition timeline. Wind River Studio Developer recently was deemed awardable in the Tradewinds marketplace.

Some marketplaces focus on solutions for an agency’s unique needs. For example, Space Force Front Door is a collaboration with commercial companies for products that serve both proven technology readiness levels (TRL) and emerging technologies, with the goal of advancing space-based capabilities. VxWorks®, Wind River Linux, Wind River Helix™ Virtualization Platform, Wind River Studio Developer, and Intel Simics are all approved and listed in Space Force Front Door. (Note: Approved suppliers are only viewable internally by Space Force.)

Software marketplaces are accelerating the U.S. government’s technology discovery and adoption, whether the solution is truly new, proven but in nondefense use cases, or already at high technology readiness levels. Wind River is dedicated to helping U.S. defense efforts by making it easier to discover and adopt our solutions via these groundbreaking marketplaces.