Defense Department Awards Its Other Multibillion Cloud Contract

While the Pentagon and Oracle continue to fight over the JEDI cloud, the Defense Department and General Services Administration announced the award of the department’s other multibillion-dollar cloud contract, the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions.

The potential $7.6 billion contract to provide back-office tools like email, word processing, spreadsheets and file-sharing was awarded to a team led by CSRA, a managed affiliate of General Dynamics Information Technology. CSRA will lead a team that includes Dell Marketing and Minburn Technology Group, according to the award announcement from GSA.

“DOD’s cloud strategy includes both general purpose and fit-for-purpose clouds. DEOS is a great example of a fit-for-purpose cloud that supports our multi-cloud strategy,” Defense Department CIO Dana Deasy said in the announcement. “DEOS will streamline our use of cloud email and collaborative tools while enhancing cybersecurity and information sharing based on standardized needs and market offerings.”

Those services will be based on the Microsoft Office 365 platform, something that was seen as a foregone conclusion as the contract developed.

“The journey to the cloud has been, and will continue to be, an iterative learning process,” Deasy said. “All lessons learned from pilot programs and the department’s early cloud adopters have been rolled into this solution. DEOS takes advantage of technical, security and contractual lessons from these ongoing pilots, while military services are leveraging them to assess the readiness of their infrastructure to support migration to DEOS.”

The contract initially encompassed additional back-office systems, but the agencies decided to split it into multiple contracts. This first award could be worth $7.6 billion over 10 years, if all options are used. That is the bulk of the $8 billion estimated value put on the original scope of the contract.

The revised acquisition strategy has been dubbed the Enterprise Collaboration and Productivity Services, or ECAPS, which will include two additional “capability sets” after DEOS.

“DEOS demonstrates our shared commitment to maximizing the buying power of the entire federal government,” said GSA Administrator Emily Murphy. “It will bring cost savings and help DOD easily share mission-critical information across all military services while enhancing cybersecurity and reducing costs. GSA is proud that DOD chose to partner with us on IT modernization and leverage the GSA Schedules.”

DEOS will get an early test from the Marine Corps, according to Kenneth Bible, deputy director for command, control, communications and computers, or C4, based out of headquarters. Bible said the Marines plan to use DEOS as part of a pilot testing capabilities in disconnected, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth, or DDIL, environments.

“The Marine Corps continues to forge a path with our DDIL pilot, shaping the services’ strategies for DEOS to more closely align with current technological trends and advancements as cloud continues to be the industry standard," he said.