Part of the Federal Cloud That Stopped Growing

The most mature cloud computing market in government -- email as a service -- peaked in 2012 and has declined every year since, according to analysis from big data and analytics firm Govini.

On the heels of the Obama administration’s 2011 “cloud first” policy and the government’s award of the EaaS blanket purchase agreement to 17 vendors, the EaaS market summited at $643 million in fiscal 2012.

Though the market came to include calendar management, customer relationship management and internal and external websites, it declined 16 percent to $539 million in fiscal 2015.

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While the rest of the federal cloud market is up 25 percent over the same time period, Matt Hummer, director of analytics and professional services for Govini, said it shouldn’t be too surprising EaaS has tailed off.

Migrating email and other tasks from internal servers to the cloud is typically considered among the low-hanging fruit of IT modernization efforts agencies undertake, Hummer said. With most agencies successfully undertaking such migration efforts, the only real action left in the market is storage and support.

“Once it’s done, it’s done, and now it’s all about maintaining,” Hummer said.

Five vendors captured 66 percent of the EaaS market since fiscal 2011, with CSRA alone capturing $733 million, more than one-fifth of all federal spending on EaaS over that time period.

The other big winners from industry include CGI Federal, SAIC, General Dynamics and Accenture.