NASA Accepts InformationWeek Technology Award

GREENBELT, Md., Oct. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Innovative Partnerships Office and the Information Technology and Communications Directorate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. accepted InformationWeek Magazine's Best Innovative Government Agency award.

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The award was presented during the InformationWeek 500 conference which took place on September 9 through 11, 2012, in Dana Point, Calif.  The InformationWeek 500 Conference is held annually to honor the most innovative U.S.-based users of business technology. This year's conference featured talks and presentations from many of today's leading technology visionaries and hosted over 275 of the nation's top business technology executives.

Goddard's Innovative Partnerships Office or IPO is responsible for the identification, review, and evaluation of an average of 250 advanced aerospace technologies and innovations per year for intellectual property protection with commercial potential for patenting, and/or licensing options. In addition, the IPO handles the negotiations of mutually beneficial collaborations between NASA and private industry, academia, or other governmental organizations that have the potential to solve near- and long-term NASA engineering or scientific challenges. As part of this technology-transfer function over the past few years, the IPO Technology Managers have negotiated Patent and Copyright licenses that have resulted in the return of royalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars shared among NASA, civil-servant inventors, and the U.S. Treasury. 

The IPO also manages the Center's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which awards small businesses more than 9 million per year; these awards, in turn, stimulate local economic development. Over the past several years, the IPO has been instrumental in seeking recognition for outstanding technologies developed by NASA Goddard innovators. Such recognitions have resulted in winning numerous awards including the research and development 100, Women in Aerospace, Space Technology Hall of Fame, NANO 50, and various Federal Laboratory Consortium awards.

NASA's Information Technology and Communications Directorate (ITCD) provide a full range of Information Technology capabilities and communications support for Goddard.  These services range from consulting and desktop support to network engineering and containerized computing.  With assistance from its academic and industry partners, ITCD designed a benchmark study testing Open-Source Cloud Computing Solutions, which resulted in standing up a Eucalyptus Cloud in Goddard's containerized environment for Geoscience applications in April 2012.  This study rides on the coat tails of a previous Agency study in which ITCD team members had significant contribution, analyzing Cloud Readiness to support Earth Sciences in industry Cloud Platforms. The ITCD study expanded the analyses for open source cloud.

Overall, the results yielded open-source Cloud solutions ready to support on-demand VM provisioning and benefit NASA as direct alignment into NASA's strategic plan for the concept of operating Cloud services for its scientists and engineers.

For more information on NASA Goddard's Innovative Partnerships Office, please visit: http://ipp.gsfc.nasa.gov/

For more information on Goddard's Information Technology and Communications Directorate visit: http://itcd.gsfc.nasa.gov.

For information on InformationWeek's 500 Conference please visit: http://www.informationweek.com/conference/

SOURCE NASA