HP captures $225M Education Department data center contract
By
Nick Wakeman
Hewlett-Packard Co. came out the winner in a $225 million competition to move much of the Office of Federal Student Aid data center requirements to the cloud.
Hewlett-Packard Co. came away the victor in a competition for the Next Generation Data Center contract with the Education Department's Federal Student Aid office.
According to the request for information, the agency uses a virtual data center infrastructure based in Plano, Texas. That infrastructure is owned and operated by Dell through its acquisition of Perot Systems. While I expect that Dell competed for the contract, I haven’t gotten confirmation from the company yet.
The Office of Federal Student Aid wants to move to a cloud environment for the 45 primary and 31 subsidiary systems applications currently hosted at the data center. About 75 percent of these can be migrated to a cloud environment. The rest are legacy applications that need to be modernized before they can be moved to the cloud.
The data center supports the processing of $150 billion in student loans, grants and other assistance. The office manages a $1 trillion loan portfolio.
Some of the services under this contract include transition services, program management, service delivery management, mainframe services, mainframe infrastructure, middleware support and operations, database administration, software licenses and management and other services.
If all options are exercised, the contract is worth $225 million over 11 years. It was competed under the NIH CIO-SP 3 contract.
We'll update more as we get comments from HP and/or Dell.