Close this Advertisement

VA mulls moving telecomm to the cloud

  • By John S. Monroe
  • Dec 23, 2011

The Veterans Affairs Department, looking to get out of the business of buying and maintaining its own telecommunications infrastructure, is considering buying cloud-based telephony services.

The VA’s Technology Acquisition Center issued a request for information Dec. 21 seeking input that could go into developing a Voice-as-a-Service pilot program. The agency is interested in seeing whether such a service could provide basic telecommunications functions – dial tone, internal and external call transfers, common reporting metrics, etc. – while also integrating with various digital communications systems, such Internet chat, videoconferencing and voice-over-IP.

“The goal is to continue to provide VA with a robust communications solution that has the scalability to adapt to future VA need,” while relieving the agency of the time and expense needed to maintain its existing telecommunications infrastructure, the RFI states.

About the Author

John S. Monroe is the editor-in-chief of Federal Computer Week.

Reader comments

Tue, Jan 3, 2012 Dave DC

Doesn't NETWORX already deliver VaaS? Basic POTS has relied on the cloud that we used to call the Public Switched Telephone Infrastructure.

Please post your comments here. Comments are moderated, so they may not appear immediately after submitting. We will not post comments that we consider abusive or off-topic.

Please type the letters/numbers you see above