USAF awards $1B cloud deal

The Air Force this week awarded a $1 billion contract to a team comprised of Dell EMC, General Dynamics and Microsoft.

The task order, which Dell EMC described as the "largest-ever … cloud-based unified communications and collaboration contract in the federal marketplace," was issued under the General Services Administration schedules held by each company. The firms formed what GSA calls a Contractor Team Arrangement, which allows the companies to offer a solution that combines the supplies and/or services from each company's individual GSA schedule contract.

GSA's Federal Acquisition Service in Denver put the procurement together.

The task order is known as Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services and will move 776,000 users in the Air Force, the Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to a cloud based system for email, unified communications and other collaboration tools.

The three companies began working together in 2015 on the Air Force's $296 million Collaboration Pathfinder contract, which deployed email, productivity tools and communications to 140,000 users. At the time, Microsoft said that effort was the largest cloud migration in the federal government. This new contract expands on that work.

"The objective is to roll out the entire program in under a year, a schedule that will allow the services to focus on their core mission and reduce costs as data centers are consolidated," Dell EMC officials said.

A longer version of this article first appeared in FCW's sister publication Washington Technology.