With 70 percent of the Army’s networking gear reaching end-of-life service, IT experts say open networking standards will play key role to getting best of breed solutions.

The U.S. Air Force inked another IT-as-a-Service deal, increasing its move towards the model that outsources basic IT functions to the private sector.

The service issued a solicitation earlier this month in search of commercial, vendor-owned IT services for its network, end user, and compute and storage needs.

The Air Force has enlisted Unisys to provide end-user services for up to three years.

AT&T won the first of the two awards worth $87.4 million through an other transaction agreement (OTA). Microsoft received the second, another OTA worth $34.4 million.

Experiments at up to 20 of 187 bases globally will "leverage commercially owned and operated IT services at those bases to learn and adjust before transitioning to the rest of the AF starting in 2020."