What’s Amazon’s role on the $10B Interior cloud contract?

FCW on Wednesday will offer an analysis of the recent $10 billion Interior Department cloud contract that will explore Amazon Web Services' role on various teams on the contract.

FCW is a sister publication to Washington Technology.

Amazon has garnered headlines of late for winning the $600 million CIA cloud computing contract that is now embroiled in a bid protest fight with IBM, but for Interior's Foundation Cloud Hosting Services contract, the company took a different route, and is acting as subcontractor for five of the 10 primes on the vehicle.

The 10 contract awardees are Aquilent, AT&T, Autonomic Resources, IBM, CGI, GTRI, Lockheed Martin, Smartronix, Unisys and Verizon. Each stands to earn as much as $1 billion over the next decade from the deal.

FCW confirmed that AWS fits into the offerings of Aquilent, Autonomic Resources, Lockheed Martin, Smartronix and Unisys. Each partnership will be slightly different, but AWS clearly is positioned to get a piece of a potentially very large pie through the DOI deal.

Systems integrators Aquilent and Smartronix are AWS’ premier consulting partners. Both companies partner with other cloud companies, as well, but AWS’ cloud platform will almost certainly figure into solutions they will offer DOI.

Autonomic Resources and Lockheed Martin will offer Amazon services on an as-needed basis. Unisys, which won the first task order under the contract -- a $44 million project to take Interior’s financial and business management system to the cloud -- also confirmed its partnership with AWS.

How much business AWS stands to gain through the Interior contract is unknown. Company officials declined to comment on the contract or on why they decided not to bid as a prime.

The company’s secondary role in this public-sector cloud deal further signals its intent to secure federal business through a wide range of channels. AWS already counts 300 local, state and federal agencies as customers.

For more on this story, go to fcw.com on Wednesday morning.