Accenture books $501M Agriculture cloud migration job

Accenture’s federal services subsidiary has booked a potential 10-year, $501.2 million contract to shift the Agriculture Department’s technology that supports financial operations into a cloud environment.

USDA currently houses its financial services in an on-premise data center and the effort stems from a previous 10-year initiative to modernize and consolidate the agency’s core financial systems and processes. Accenture Federal Services said Wednesday it will install, configure and transition the new environment and also provide hosting support for USDA under this contract.

AFS will specifically base USDA’s new cloud on the Secure HANA Cloud offering provided by SAP NS2, the global IT conglomerate’s U.S. federal subsidiary. Other teammates of AFS include Carahsoft, Louisiana Technology Group and ManpowerGroup Public Sector.

This job falls under the accelerated push by agencies like USDA to move several of their business functions into cloud environments as part of the larger governmentwide IT modernization push. Analysts and other market observers widely expect cloud contract spending to continue to rise.

Separately, USDA is also the storefront or “lighthouse” agency for a General Services Administration initiative to kick off IT modernization work in certain areas and then scale out creations from those projects into other agencies. GSA awarded a second round of contracts earlier this week under that “Centers of Excellence” program.