The issue I see here is the author of this article has marginal experience with federal contracting. "The people who wrote the code for these systems are long

The issue I see here is the author of this article has marginal experience with federal contracting. "The people who wrote the code for these systems are long gone...they are prone to transaction timeouts" ... wrong, wrong and wrong. There are plenty of coders still around maintaining these systems, even with the obscure technologies like MUMPS and all and they are running on rather robust hardware in huge datacenters. Second of all, the government should NEVER outsource integration - the systems integrator requires an authority to manage other contractors that only the government is capable of holding.