Verity Gives U.S. Air Force New Wings

When the United States Air Force consolidates intranets from 110 global bases early next year, more than a million Air Force personnel, families and contractors will depend on its new portal, My.AirForce, to keep connected.

The Air Force Tuesday says the portal will be partly powered by Verity and its K2-based infrastructure software to help search and organize millions of pages of content, including confidential information.

At the My.AirForce portal, an USAF-operated site, aircraft maintenance personnel, for example, will be able to search for parts and update the repair status of jet fighters. Personnel moving to new bases can get information about local schools, shopping and entertainment. Contractors will be able to retrieve specifications that help them design new military facilities and equipment.

The Air Force will use Sunnyvale-based Verity’s K2 software in tandem with BroadVision’s
InfoExchange Portal.

“This will help our personnel and support contractors find critical information quickly and easily,” says U.S. Air Force portal program manager Lt. Col. Mark Bryant. “My.AirForce is an immensely complex portal project that connects more than 28,000 legacy information systems and over 1,500 Air Force Web sites and intranets associated with USAF bases around the world. In head-to-head testing against other proposed solutions, Verity demonstrated the capability to meet Air Force requirements and integrate with existing systems.”

For the new My.AirForce site, Verity will be using its K2 Spider with 128-bit SSL Encryption. The spider indexes and stores documents in hundreds of formats from thousands of internal and external locations. The portal also takes advantage of Verity’s Intelligent Classification and Content Organization kernel. The technology helps users automatically navigate through familiar directories and categories.

“We are proud that the USAF sought Verity’s experience to power an ambitious enterprise portal,” says Verity president Anthony Bettencourt. “We are confident that Verity K2-based portal infrastructure software will deliver the quality and performance that the USAF demands for secure, highly scalable search and retrieval of valuable online content.”