IBM announced on Wednesday that it has been awarded a 10-year contract, valued up to $1 billion, to help the United States Department of the Interior (US DOI) as the Department migrates its information technology systems to the cloud.
As part of an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, the Department will have access to IBM’s cloud computing technologies, services and hosting as the foundation of their next generation infrastructure, the company said.
IBM said that its solution for the DOI is based on IBM’s secure and high availability Federal Data Center capabilities that utilize open computing and process standards.
According to the announcement, the US DOI will leverage IBM expertise in data storage, secure file transfer, virtual machines, database, web hosting, development testing and SAP Application Hosting. The Department will also be able to tap IBM’s Smart Cloud for Government hosted at the IBM Federal Data Center, the Smart Cloud for Enterprise (SCE) commercial offerings and the very cost competitive IBM AIX Cloud.
Additionally, other US government agencies can gain access to IBM’s Cloud solutions via the DOI Foundation Cloud Hosting Services vehicle, which permits request for quotes/task orders to be issued on behalf of other government customers including both civilian agencies and the Department of Defense.
The US DOI is the steward of 20 percent of the Nation’s land, totaling 500 million acres, and is the largest supplier and manager of water in 17 states overseeing 476 dams and 348 reservoirs.
According to IBM, the Department has a public commitment to save $100M a year from 2016 to 2021.
“Now that we can finally move forward with these contracts, we’re expecting significant reductions in hardware, software, and operations costs to the taxpayer,” Andrew Jackson, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology, Information and Business Services at the DOI, noted in a blog post.
“Our first project under these contracts is for SAP application hosting,” Jackson added. “Additional services will include virtual machines, storage, database hosting, secure file transfers, Web hosting, as well as development and test environments. These contracts will not only allow us to move these apps to the cloud, but move them in a well-planned, methodical way.”
“This is a change we’ve been eager to make for a while,” he added. “The cloud hosting award was on hold until recently, when a contract protest was dismissed by the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.”
*Updated with additional details