2016 AFCEA Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium

Anthony L. Purvis
Chief of Compute Operations for the Hosting and Compute Center
Defense Information Systems Agency


Anthony L. Purvis is Chief, Computing Ecosystem within the DISA Operations Center. The Ecosystem contains nine Lines of Business (Mainframe, Server, Infrastructure and Sustainment, Datacenter, Implementatio, Special Services, Cyber Services, Communications and Command and Control). These lines of business are geographically dispersed across 11 worldwide locations and are responsible for deploying capacity, monitoring utilization, administering operating environments, refreshing technology, and depreciating capacity for all DISA mission partners. Mr. Purvis continually looks for ways to seek efficiencies, reduce cost and provide excellent operational support to the warfighter. Prior to assuming his current position, Mr Purvis served as the Director, Defense Enterprise Computing Center Oklahoma City, one of the four major computing centers within the DISA Operations Center. DECC Oklahoma City is a premier computing center with responsibility for several DoD enterprise services such as DoD Enterprise Email (DEE) and DoD Mobility Unclassified Capability (DMUC). In 2005, Mr Purvis was the Chief of the Business Services Management Center for the Computing Services Directorate in DISA. In this role for over five years, he managed a budget of $800M/year covering 16 production sites and two test and development sites for the IBM, Unisys and Server operating environments supporting Department of Defense customers. Under his leadership, several large projects received agency-level visibility, including the capacity services contracts totaling $700M over eight years. These contracts provide more flexible and scalable support to Computing Services' customers by readily adjusting to increases and decreases in required production capacity while reducing costs to manage and operate the environment. These contracts were the first of their kind in the government. He received recognition from several technical magazines and from many levels within DoD. He began his federal career in 1990 as an Air Force Palace Acquire Intern supporting the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. During this period, he was an artificial intelligence programmer, worked on the design of the Pentagon’s network infrastructure and provided desktop support to the OSD staff offices. He relocated to Tinker AFB in 1992, where he moved into the financial arena supporting the transition of the Air Force Regional Processing Center to the Defense Information Systems Agency. He was the financial project lead for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency workload migration, which was the first time DISA competed with private industry and won the transition and operation services. Mr. Purvis holds a Master of Business Administration from Oklahoma City University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration - Management Information Systems from Oklahoma State University.

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