The WINTrio team is being honored in Category 4: Using Innovative Technologies to Deliver Simple, Seamless, and Secure Services for modernizing the technology behind USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), the nation’s authoritative source for agricultural statistics and commodity pricing. To replace aging, fragmented systems, the team delivered NICE, a cloud-native DevSecOps platform that improves how NASS secures, manages, and delivers mission-critical agricultural data.

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The team embedded AI, Zero Trust security, automated governance, reusable APIs, and standardized CI/CD pipelines directly into the development environment. AI-assisted development accelerated modernization, while automated verification protected more than 80,000 monthly census assets with zero data loss. The team also completed USDA’s first Sybase-to-Azure migration within days and modernized four mission-critical legacy applications within one year. The platform’s success led NASS to establish NICE as its enterprise standard for future applications.

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The modernization has produced significant results: data ingestion speeds increased 200%, application time-to-market improved 65%, defects and security incidents declined 60%, and operations and maintenance costs decreased 50%. Automated workflows also free NASS employees from time-consuming manual processes so they can focus on higher-value statistical analysis. By making agricultural data systems faster, more reliable, and more secure, Rashid and WINTrio are strengthening the information farmers, businesses, policymakers, and the public rely on for commodity markets, crop insurance, and rural economic decisions.