The U.S. Government sponsored the creation of a public/private partnership, i.e. not-for-profit tax exempt institute, the World Wide Consortium for the Grid (W2COG) Institute, around the notion of "netcentric" engineering and acquisition.  "Netcentricity” is a concept of effective, ad hoc, collaboration among distributed providers and consumers of information to achieve "information superiority."  To realize this netcentric vision, the government must exploit Internet technology and concepts like SOA, open source software, IPv6, etc, on the same rapid time scales that the best practitioners of e-business achieve.  In other words, the government must use netcentric engineering and procurement to build netcentric capability.   

Traditional government acquisition process, which is after all designed to field large specialized systems is not up to the task.  W2COG and its open "GIGlite" on-line laboratory attack the problem by embedding government approved certification processes in a commercial/government off the shelf (COTS/GOTS)  "open technology development" (OTD) environment. This environment deliberately seeks to incentivize highly innovative commercial and academic organizations that have not traditionally worked on government requirements.  

COTS and GOTS network enabling software will be tested against the sponsors’ operational and technical use cases for utility and security in an agile, rapid, "bundling" process. Successful prototype bundles will receive "net-ready" certification and be registered as “reference implementations”.  Productized reference implementations will be placed on the COTS market as pre-approved for government use.  This method offers government and industry alike a faster, cheaper, better way to demonstrate and deploy netcentric capability