In September 2011, Bill Marion, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command and President of the AFCEA Tidewater Chapter, gave a keynote speech about the Air Force efforts to migrate toward a unified communications (UC) environment.
Marion is responsible for providing senior technical guidance on architectures and strategic planning for nearly 15,000 communications professionals and information technology specialists. This extends further to approximately 100,000 active-duty military and civilian members across 30 major installations in the United States and overseas. Marion is based at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia.
Marion is a strong advocate and visionary for the promise of Unified Capabilities (UC). During his presentation, he elaborated on four specific change drivers, mission drivers, and architectures. He stressed the need for vendors to become active partners in helping shape the future of UC for the military in general. He expressed concerns that lack of multivendor environments may hamper innovation efforts in this area, but he remained confident of reaching the end vision state in the very near future.
Bill Marion can be found on Twitter at: @acc_cto
