Appian Corporation today announced that the U.S. Navy has awarded the company a multi-million dollar contract relating to its enterprise knowledge management and learning portal, Navy Knowledge Online (NKO). The contract includes additional scaling of NKO; on-going support and maintenance of the portal; the purchase of additional hardware; beta-testing of an at-sea version of NKO; and the development of Navy Knowledge Online SIPRNET (NKO-S) - a classified version of NKO. Additionally, NKO will be upgraded to Appian Enterprise v.3.0, the latest version of Appian's award-winning collaborative intranet solution suite.
Naval Education and Training Command (NETC), which oversees training and educational opportunities for the Navy's 350,000 active service personnel, selected the Appian Enterprise solution last July, to power NKO. Deployed in just 30 days in August of 2002 and now the largest and fastest growing portal within the Navy, NKO has over 165,000 registered users.
"The rapid adoption of Navy Knowledge Online further underscores the demand for an enterprise-wide, life long learning, personal development and knowledge management portal, to support not only the Navy's education and training initiatives, but also the way it does business," said CAPT James Kantner, Naval Personnel Development Command Knowledge Manager. "Navy Knowledge Online is quickly becoming the Navy's primary means of connecting sailors to the information and subject-matter expertise they need to be successful in their chosen careers, as well as to their peers, so that they can share and learn from each other's experiences," added CAPT James Kantner.
By upgrading NKO to Appian Enterprise v.3.0, the Navy will be able to take advantage of new features of the solution, including enhanced support for communities of practice. This knowledge management capability will make it easier for users to self-organize into interactive, collaborative communities dedicated to a common concern, problem, or mission. Also in Appian Enterprise v.3.0, identity management and personalization technologies will allow every command, group, and individual to dynamically create and share their community portal pages with populations of their choosing, based on individual or group profiles. Finally, by upgrading to Appian Enterprise v.3.0, NKO will be able to leverage advanced content management, and web analytics functionality to better tailor the site to sailors' needs.
As part of the new contract, Appian will also develop and deploy a SIPRNET version of NKO using Appian Enterprise v.3.0. Naval communities that perform work of a classified nature, such as the Submarine Learning Center, the Center for Naval Intelligence, and the Center for Naval Cryptology, can take advantage of NKO-S' collaborative features from within the secure environment of SIPRNET.
Appian Enterprise v.3.0, which was launched in June, is the industry's first open, standards-based J2EE compliant enterprise Web solution suite to seamlessly integrate portal, document and content management, personalization, and identity management technologies. The Appian Enterprise solution suite is based on new versions of Appian's award-winning software products: Appian Portal and Appian Collaboration. The suite also features a new product, Appian Personalization, an advanced security and identity management engine that powers the delivery of ubiquitous, interactive personalization across the enterprise web.
Appian customers successfully deploying solutions based on Appian Enterprise include the U.S. Army, the World Bank, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Both the upgraded version of NKO and NKO-S will be deployed on BEA WebLogic Server, an application server provided by BEA Systems.
Appian provides real-time, enterprise web solutions to the public and commercial sectors.