Feds Close A Cloud Deal With IBM Worth A Billion Dollar

After having faith in the cloud offering of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), the Department of the Interior (DOI) has agreed to sign a deal with the Corporation that’s worth $1 Billion.

According to the General Manager of IBM US Federal, Anne Altman, “IBM has been delivering trusted and secure cloud services to business and government clients for decades, and working with virtualization technologies for more than 40 years.” She continued to talk about the achievements of IBM over the years and how this deal will be useful to the DOI.

This isn’t just a normal contract, IBM has a lot riding on this offer. DOI attends to 20 percent of the state’s land. On these, half a billion acres are 397 units of the national park system, 556 national wildlife refuges, 21 national conservation areas and 16 national monuments.

Then there’s more to it. The DOI is the largest provider and administrator of water in 17 states, supervising 476 dams and 348 reservoirs. The organization also manages the land, subsurface rights and offshore areas that create approximately 24 percent of the nation’s energy and it maintains dealings with 566 federally known Native American tribes with a total population of 1.7 million.

The 16 bureaus and offices that handle this job use up more than $1 billion a year on IT. In a time of declining budgets, the DOI is shifting to an administration model for IT that moves from fixed to variable, resources to services and work impact instead of IT service metrics. The DOI has a public obligation to bank $100 million a year from 2016 to 2021 and then use those funds to finance reserves in new business potential and applications.

Whatever the risks maybe, the DOI will benefit a lot from this agreement. Not only will they be using IBM’s Cloud for their data storage, secure file transfer, virtual machines, database, web hosting, development testing and SAP application hosting, but 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 commercial contributions and the IBM AIX Cloud. And additional U.S. administration organizations can also increase approached to these IBM Cloud facilities by means of the DOI Foundation Cloud Hosting Services vehicle. The vehicle also allows appeal for quotes/duty instructions to be issued on behalf of other government clients together with both civilian agencies and the Department of Defense.

“The company certainly understands what federal and even state and local processes are like. So inserting IBM into what can be a complicated process for integrators isn’t a big stretch”, said Zeus Kerravala, chief analyst at ZK Research.

He continued saying, “There is confidence in IBM. They’ve been a leader in cloud, certainly on the integration side, since before the term cloud was popular — when on-demand computing was the term we threw around. When you look at the combination of overall experience, technology — they certainly offer a full cloud stack, combined with the ability to integrate just about anybody’s technology — they are a very safe choice for government organizations.”

Having one of the first Cloud system was an honor for IBM and undoubtedly it’s one of the best. However, as government establishments increase their use of cloud computing, applications will also grow in complexity, beyond email-as-a-facility.