Government Agency: NASA

Solution or Platform Selected: Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   NASA’s Innovative Partnership Program (IPP) provides essential technology and capabilities for NASA's Mission Directorates, Programs, and Projects through investments and partnerships with Industry, Academia, Government Agencies and National Laboratories. The IPP fosters technology partnerships, commercialization, and innovation in support of its overall mission and national priorities. NASA needs to maintain an Agency-wide Information service layer to capture, disseminate and assess IPP relationships with its partners to perform this mission. This information has broad applicability, internal and external to NASA, extending from NASA's programs and projects, to Congress and the public. To manage these relationships effectively and broadcast relevant information to different partners, NASA required a widely-accessible and rapidly deployable low cost system. This requirement led to the selection of a customized Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customer relationship management (CRM) solution. This SaaS solution is the first step towards realizing NASA’s vision of a 360º view of interactions between NASA and external entities, including companies, federal agencies, and non-profit organizations.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   Salesforce.com was selected as the SaaS product and REI Systems, Inc. was tasked to carve out a solution that leveraged both, native capabilities of the CRM product and the Force.com platform. This SaaS solution, built on a cloud computing infrastructure, would meet NASA’s accessibility and scalability requirements, ease of customization, design flexibility and tight delivery timelines. NASA adopted a phased approach to solution deployment that allowed the system to be extended and accessed incrementally across different NASA centers. In addition, the SaaS application provides the flexibility to gradually integrate the CRM component of IPP with other NASA applications over time to provide users with a consolidated view of the end-to-end processes. This solution, implemented by REI, fulfills NASA’s unique requirements across different centers with all their security and access considerations. The capabilities include user role hierarchies and access rules that support complex visibility requirements on IPP CRM data records. The solution design has a provision of a centralized repository, for all of NASA centers’ data, providing a 360-degree-view of all information for IPP’s executives and managers. The system enables each center to manage its own data while providing NASA headquarters with a global perspective.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   NASA is planning to go live with this application by the third week of February 2009. The SaaS solution, implemented by REI Systems, a trusted NASA partner for the last 18 years, provides a customized system tailored to their specific business processes that are highly scalable and adaptable to changing requirements. REI was able to eliminate months of development time thereby achieving NASA’s aggressive implementation deadlines. This highly secure system deployment enables NASA to search and manage relationships between partners, agreements, technologies, and seed funds. The system also provides over-arching visibility to different user groups across centers. REI systems, Inc., is a registered salesforce.com partner, and has supported more than 130 SaaS implementations across various verticals, with great success. REI utilized their SaaS experience and best practices, to support NASA’s complex requirements and delivered a solution that helps IPP achieve its mission. NASA Contact: David Maluf,email-david.a.maluf@nasa.gov;REI Systems,Inc. Contact: Pradeep Kamath, email- pkamath@reisys.com, ph- 571-216-5991;Salesforce.com contact: Mark Cerniglia, email- mcerniglia@salesforce.com, ph- 703-447-4050.