The Defense Information Systems Agency recently hired three small businesses to help the agency move, monitor and secure the Net-Centric Enterprise Services program as it migrates to the Web.

The contracts, together worth roughly $2.6 million, were awarded to Systinet of Burlington, Mass., AmberPoint of Oakland, Calif., and WebLayers Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.

Systinet was chosen to provide the enterprise commercial technology for a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration Registry. The company was awarded a $1.15 million contract with five additional $200,000 maintenance options over five years. AmberPoint, under a $750,000 contract, is providing an enterprise service management product to help DISA monitor the NCES run-time environment. WebLayers also received $750,000 for its service-oriented architecture governance capability, so governance polices can be enforced when services are published on the UDDI registry.

This spring, DISA will deliver its pilot Service Discovery Core Enterprise Service, based on Systinet’s UDDI business services registry, "as a transition path to achieving global interoperability within the DOD through the Net-Centric Enterprise Services program," according to a Systinet company release.

WebLayers was hired to "govern distributed UDDI registries to ensure that all XML artifacts published, consumed and operated are in full compliance with the DOD enterprise policies," read a WebLayers company release.

UDDI is a cross-industry effort driven by major platform and software providers. For months, DISA has talked about establishing a UDDI registry for use within the NCES program. NCES, one of the major components of the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid, will cover nine core services: applications, collaboration, discovery, enterprise service management, mediation, messaging, security, storage and user assistance.