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In-Q-Tel, the venture investment firm of the CIA, has entered an agreement with Huddle to develop a secure version of its content collaboration platform for use by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Huddle is developing a version of its cloud-based platform that complies with the Federal Information Security Management Act, a requirement for U.S. government agencies. The Department of Homeland Security and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) are in line to implement the technology.

Huddle's software enables file sharing and project collaboration, supports access from a variety of mobile devices, and provides administrative controls such as version control and auditing. The platform is used by European government agencies in Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greenland, Finland, and the United Kingdom. Robert Ames, In-Q-Tel's VP of information and communications technologies, cited intelligence agencies' interest in "secure collaboration" as driving the development pact.

[ For more on government's growing dependence on the cloud, see 10 Developments Show Government Cloud Maturing. ]

This is In-Q-Tel's second investment in cloud computing in as many months. Last month, In-Q-Tel signed an agreement with Adaptive Computing to develop a cloud operating system. The company is also working with cloud storage specialist Cleversafe.

CIA director David Petraeus commented on In-Q-Tel's pursuit of cloud capabilities at the company's CEO Summit in March. The cloud "provides important new capabilities for performing analysis across all data, allowing our analysts and decision makers to ask ad-hoc analytic questions of big data in a quick, precise fashion," Petraeus said.

New cloud technologies developed by In-Q-Tel partner companies are driving analytic transformation in the way organizations store, access, and process massive amounts of disparate data via massively parallel and distributed IT systems."

Huddle promotes itself as an alternative to Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration technology. The company's commercial customers include Kia Motors and pharmaceuticals company Merck.

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