DOD, REAN Cloud finalize $950M 'OTA' cloud procurement contract

The Defense Department is publicly saying its cloud computing strategy is still taking shape but the services around it are evidently starting to take shape.

DOD has awarded a potential five-year, $950 million contract to the Herndon, Virginia-based IT systems integrator REAN Cloud, through which the department aims to give its agencies direct access to cloud services.

Transportation Command will be the first defense agency to use this contract for cloud acquisitions, REAN Cloud said Wednesday. Technically, the contract is a production other transaction authority contract and is modeled after a prototype project the company carried out for Transcom.

REAN Cloud initiated that project last year to develop a prototype commercial cloud migration setup for Transcom. The company worked with DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental organization to facilitate prototyping and procurement of cloud adoption requirements that include infrastructure-as-a-service, application assessments, migrations and operations.

Herndon, Virginia-based REAN Cloud is a partner of Amazon Web Services.

AWS happens to be the intended recipient of a yet undisclosed, sole-source contract from Transcom for commercial cloud services at the “Secret” classification level. While the dollar amount was not released, Transcom said that contract will have a nine-month base period with four one-year options. Microsoft is protesting that action.

That comes amid industry concern that DOD’s larger cloud acquisition could favor AWS over the likes of IBM, Microsoft and other systems integrators.