USDA's GIS Portal

Nextgov reports USDA is doing a portal to all of its GIS stuff.  The catch is schedule:

The new portal, which is hosted in Amazon's public EC2 computer cloud, is already available to a few divisions within Agriculture and will be launched departmentwide in the next couple of months, Lowe said. The site should be available to the public about six to eight months after that.

Why, if it's operational, does it take 6-8 months to make it available to the public?  Esri is the vendor doing the protal.