When it comes to the U.S. Department of Interior’s big cloud migration contract, everyone’s a winner. Or at least ten companies can claim bragging rights, and brag they all did in a succession of press releases starting in May and culminating last week.
But the one cloud player you might expect to top any short list, Amazon Web Services, was nowhere in sight, even though unlike some finalists — Verizon and IBM, for example — it at least has its FedRAMP certification. But don’t be fooled. AWS will be in this cloud.
While the DoI waited till Wednesday to officially announce the ten finalists, the names have been known at least since March and press releases started flowing months ago. The hold up, apparently, was that CenturyLink, which did not make the cut, sued and final DoI notifications had to wait pending outcome of that suit (CenturyLink lost in July.)
Autonomic Resources announced its win in May. Smartronix, Aquilent and Unisys followed suit in June; and CGI and Lockheed Martin issued press releases earlier in August. IBM did it Thursday and Verizon brought up the rear on Friday. Not sure where AT&T’s or GTRI’s releases are but those two vendors are also on the short list of companies that can compete for this DoI business.
Each of the ten can, in theory, earn up to $ 1 billion from this work but more importantly, as reps from several of the vendors told me, the fact that they are on the approved list opens doors to more work going forward.
But while AWS is not mentioned, but that doesn’t mean it’s won’t get any DoI business. AWS partners with three of the ten approved vendors Aquilent, Smartronix and Lockheed Martin, so I’m betting it will get a piece of this action.
In its release, Smartronix said its Intelligent Cloud Hub (ICH),
“ provides access to Service Catalogs across multiple Cloud Service Providers. Smartronix announced in January that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the first cloud provider enabled by the ICH and offers a broad range of AWS services through its Foundation Gateway Portal developed exclusively for DOI.”
Smartronix, like other vendors bidding for big government contracts, works with many tech vendors including Microsoft, Cisco, Equinix, SAP, Oracle and others. So when it comes to government contracts, especially big government cloud contracts, you have to peel back the onion to see what technologies are going in.
With the federal government pursuing a “cloud first” initiative to modernize its IT infrastructure, there’s big bucks to be made in government work so stay tuned for lots more noise around contracts. And if you don’t think the stakes are sky high, just look at the melee sparked over the CIA cloud. The last we heard, Amazon filed suit in a federal claims court contesting an IBM challenge to the CIA’s decision to use … you got it: AWS.
Confusing, no? Welcome to the world of government contracting.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Thomas Faivre-Duboz
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