DOD Awards $950 Million Cloud Contract to REAN Cloud
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The Defense Department makes another cloud move.
The Defense Department on Wednesday finalized a $950 million deal with REAN Cloud that would make cloud adoption services available to Pentagon agencies.
Virginia-based REAN Cloud, an Amazon Web Service Premier Partner, will provide cloud services such as infrastructure as a service, application assessments, migrations and operations to the department under a five-year, other transaction authority production contract.
The Pentagon modeled the deal off a prototype project REAN Cloud completed for the U.S. Transportation Command last year. The company previously worked with the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental—a group responsible for bringing commercial innovation to the military—to expand its services to meet the full range of cloud adoption requirements.
“The speed and agility that our patent-pending technology brings to cloud migration and operations invites a similarly nimble approach for the government,” said Sekhar Puli, a managing partner at REAN Cloud. “Our DoD customers can now achieve the same efficiencies available to the commercial sector as they seek to design, migrate, automate, manage and scale systems and databases running in the cloud.”
OTAs fall outside of the Federal Acquisition Regulation and have become increasingly popular as the Pentagon looks to speed up tech purchases. Congress must grant an agency the power to enter such agreements, and in the Defense Department’s case, allows the department to engage in OTAs for research and prototyping when a “non-traditional” defense contractor plays a “significant” role or when one-third of costs come from non-federal sources in a cost-sharing agreement.
Defense leaders have been pushing the department to adopt cloud technologies at a faster pace since a September memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan. The department created a steering committee to navigate the department’s cloud acceleration, with the stated goal of procuring enterprisewide cloud services.
The new contract comes amid industry concerns about a Pentagon contract that would award billions to a single cloud service provider. Companies fear the mammoth deal would favor large providers like AWS over smaller firms.