Dell, GD, Microsoft land $1B Air Force cloud migration contract
By
Nick Wakeman
Dell EMC, GDIT and Microsoft have won a $1 billion cloud contract that might be the biggest email and collaboration initiative in the federal market.
The Air Force may have just awarded the largest cloud contract in the government market with its $1 billion award to a team comprised of Dell EMC, General Dynamics and Microsoft.
The task order was issued under the GSA Schedules held by each company. They formed what GSA calls a Contractor Team Arrangement, which allows the companies to offer a solution that combines the supplies and/or services from each company’s individual GSA schedule contract.
The General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service in Denver put the procurement together.
The task order is known as Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services and will move 776,000 users in the Air Force, the Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to a cloud based system for email, unified communications and other collaboration tools.
Dell EMC is the lead on the team because it is a major reseller of Microsoft Office 365 cloud products.
“By complementing each company’s capabilities, the Dell-GDIT-Microsoft team is able to offer a comprehensive, cost effective, commercial CHES solution to the government,” Dan Busby, a vice president and general manager of IT services and solutions at GDIT, told Washington Technology.
Busby said that given the complexity of what the Air Force was asking for in its solicitation there was no single GSA enterprise as a service blanket purchase agreement that could meet all of the requirements.
“GDIT and Dell formed a GSA Contractor Team Arrangement to pursue this opportunity, so we are truly partners on the contract,” he said.
The three companies began working together in 2015 on the Air Force’s $296 million Collaboration Pathfinder contract, which deployed email, productivity tools and communications to 140,000 users. At the time, Microsoft said it was the largest cloud migration in the federal government.
This new contract expands on Collaboration Pathfinder with a wider scope, Dell EMC said in a statement. The companies claim it is the large contract for unified communications and collaboration in the federal market.
“The objective is to roll out the entire program in under a year, a schedule that will allow the services to focus on their core mission and reduce costs as data centers are consolidated,” the company said.
The contract includes Dell EMC consulting services for migrating communication and collaboration systems and assessing other applications for cloud migration or retirement.
“This new contract builds on the foundation and success of Collaboration Pathfinder that launched the department’s modernization initiative,” said Steve Harris, senior vice president and general manager of Dell EMC Federal.