Interior awards 7 seats on $2B cloud license contract

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The original version of this story stated four awardees. The Interior Department has since announced three additional awards.)

The Interior Department has awarded seven companies positions on a potential 10-year, $2 billion contract vehicle covering cloud computing licenses and related support services.

Those selections are for iteration number two of the Foundation Cloud Hosting Services vehicle, which focuses on the development of a cloud-based production environment and migrations of assets including applications into a cloud infrastructure.

Interior announced on Tuesday and Wednesday its choices of

• Accenture's U.S. federal subsidiary
• CGI Federal
• Cognosante
• IBM
• Science Applications International Corp.
• SMX
• Zivaro

The department received 11 bids in total for the recompete, according to Federal Procurement Data System records.

Accenture Federal Services and Cognosante are newcomers to the FCHS2 contract, while the other five awardees will continue on as incumbents from the current version that is slated to expire on Oct. 30.

Interior has obligated $601 million for the current contract to account for approximately 69% of the ceiling, according to GovTribe data. All of the top five incumbents will carry onto the new iteration.

CGI Federal is the largest of them at $192 million in task order spend, followed by SMX at $190 million. SAIC is third at $101.7 million, then Zivaro at $60.7 million and IBM rounds that list out at $21.4 million.

FCHS2 is a companion contract to Cloud Hosting Solutions III, a potential $1 billion award booked by Peraton in the spring that emphasizes storage via access to multiple cloud hosting providers. CHS III essentially designates Peraton acts as Interior's lead enterprise cloud broker for the next 11 years.

Through both of those contracts, Interior is looking to further consolidate its data centers and lean heavier on cloud environments for the department's core technology services.