04/17/2007

Appian, a provider of Business Process Management Suites (BPMS), today announced that it has been selected by Northrop Grumman to provide the enterprise portal technology and underlying process-based services to support the U.S. Army’s task order to develop Defense Knowledge Online (DKO). The task order with a $267 million ceiling was awarded under the U.S. Air Force Network-Centric Solutions contract vehicle and is the largest portal task order ever awarded in the federal government.

ebizQ received the following details:

“As the key technology provider for the initial Army Knowledge Online (AKO) initiative, Appian is excited by this next stage of implementation as it evolves into DKO to serve the entire Department of Defense,” said Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian. “DKO promises to provide all warfighters with access to the information they need to better do their jobs and complete their missions, and we are actively working to deliver the best possible solution to attain this goal.”

Leveraging Appian’s robust platform, DKO will be the single enterprise service portal, serving as the entry point for all U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and authorized users to access DoD and government intranets supporting operations, missions and critical support processes for forces worldwide. DKO will provide relevant information and applications to the warfighter and other government users through a secure service-oriented framework to help them perform their missions more effectively. As the industry’s best-of-breed large-scale knowledge-based portal, Appian’s technology will help enable the DKO enterprise solution to grow from 1.8 million users to possibly eight million users or more, potentially across all federal government agencies.

Using Appian Enterprise, DKO delivers advanced personalization capabilities for deploying content to an unlimited number of targeted communities based on the profiles and preferences of groups of users. DKO users can collaborate as individuals or groups in private and secure virtual communities that they create themselves, on demand. DKO can thus establish a nested network of structured communities of practice (CoPs) that can span all operations, training, leader and doctrine domains within the DoD. As the key enabling technology that connects these domains, DKO enables the DoD to develop, institutionalize and apply best practices in real-time; improving decision-making and performance across the spectrum of Army operations.

The length of the DKO task order is one year with four six-month options. Initial work will be performed at Fort Belvoir, Va., an undisclosed site in Maryland, and in southwest Asia.