Problem: The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) looked to add on to its existing blade-server environment to support new applications.

Solution: Merlin International® designed the architecture and configured individual blades to run applications in a virtual environment.

Results: A virtual environment has helped DIA servers run more effectively while reducing management costs.

Problem: In 2006 and 2007, laptops were lost containing data on more than 27 million veterans. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) received substantial media coverage and judicial attention on these data breaches.

Solution: Merlin International® provided a phased deployment, identifying more than 30,000 critical-risk assets and 200,000 total assets in one of the nation’s most complex environments.

Results: For a department once synonymous with data breaches, no VA laptop breaches were reported in 2008 or 2009.

Problem: The contact center at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was servicing a record volume of potential immigrants at a high cost per contact. At the same time, the self-service USCIS Web portal reached its capacity.

Solution: Merlin International® designed and built a new process-oriented USCIS portal that is user friendly and aligned with the immigration process to include all of the required steps and forms. Merlin also engineered a higher capacity, fault-tolerant platform for the portal.

Results: The new portal became the reference standard for the U.S. immigration process. USCIS contact center calls, and thus costs, dramatically decreased due to user effectiveness with the portal.

Problem: After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) faced a considerably changed mission. The TSA needed the ability to rapidly evaluate new and disruptive technologies for applicability to its post-9/11 technology requirements.

Solution: Merlin International® built out an “on-demand” prototyping lab that delivered virtual resources – servers, storage and network – to technology evaluators.

Results: Employing a shared-resource model, the TSA dramatically reduced the overhead, lead-time and expenses of evaluating new technologies that come with dedicated platforms.

Problem: The U.S. Department of Defense’s U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) needed to share its information-technology logistics data and capabilities with other DoD entities in a net-centric environment, but it did not have the required service oriented architecture (SOA).

Solution: Merlin International® delivered a complete SOA solution, including service life cycle processes, governance, policy management, registry/repository with ontology, operations, administration and management, and security services.

Results: By having a complete SOA infrastructure, USTRANSCOM is now able to share logistics data and capabilities in a net-centric environment.

Problem: The U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) needed to streamline product evaluations for its international service oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure.

Solution: Merlin International® conducted a structured SOA technology evaluation that looked at functionality, service-level agreement (SLA), security and ease-of-use to make a recommendation to SPAWAR regarding its SOA infrastructure.

Results: SPAWAR moved forward with confidence on a decision regarding its SOA infrastructure technologies because it had completed the required analysis.

Problem: Business transactions at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) cut across systems, but its information-technology systems are of the stovepipe variety – purpose-built over time on a range of technologies. As a result, end-to-end control was not possible.

Solution: Merlin International® delivered an integration bus to provide common interfaces and messaging to the disparate IT systems and then orchestrated transactions that fluidly span them.

Results: NIH now has insight and control over its important transactions, not just its systems. NIH has realized cost savings through the efficiencies of direct system-to-system integration versus human data entry.

Problem: Business process management-enabled procurement processes at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) were performing slower than desired.

Solution: Merlin International® applied its expertise to execute a tuning analysis of the MDA business process management (BPM) environment to include the process models, a BPM server, storage servers and a hosting platform.

Results: Prioritized optimization recommendations were delivered on all aspects of the MDA BPM environment to bring performance back in line with user expectations.

Problem: A large, complex environment that needed encryption before the 2009 tax season, or risk significant data loss and project delays. This environment included more than 100,000 endpoints, such as USB thumb drives storing critical Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data.

Solution: Merlin International® partnered with IRS technical leaders for approximately nine months of system integration to provide an EAL4, FIPS 140-2, 508-compliant, centrally managed solution to all IRS endpoints.

Results: Merlin’s solution greatly enhanced confidentiality, with a new security policy that automatically forced encryption on all data sent to any USB removable storage device from any endpoint and by the deadline.

Problem: The various resources supporting internal employees of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) amounted to a variety of stovepipe systems that were not integrated and needed get transparently shared.

Solution: Merlin International® provided a service oriented architecture (SOA) solution for DISA’s internal enterprise services so they could get shared any number of ways without incurring the maintenance burden associated with unique integrations.

Results: DISA’s internal enterprise services have been integrated into stand-alone portals (the EDGE) as well as Army and Defense Knowledge Online (AKO/DKO) with no additional development required.