Just weeks after Amazon Web Services Inc. landed a stake in a multibillion-dollar cloud computing contract for the US Department of Defense, it has struck another major deal with the US Navy.
As part of the five-year deal, AWS will provide a range of cloud services to the Navy, according to a notice posted to the Defense Department’s website on Monday. The $723.9 million agreement is described as a single-price, fixed-price, lump-sum purchase agreement for enterprise software licenses.
Under the terms of the deal, AWS will provide the Department of the Navy with access to its commercial cloud environment, professional services, and AWS training and certification courses. The Navy said the purchase agreement did not commit any funds at the time of award. Instead, funds are committed as task orders are placed and come from a variety of sources including working capital, operations and maintenance funds.
The document names the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, California as the principal for the transaction and the work will be carried out between December 2022 and December 2028 for a maximum of five years.
Earlier this month, AWS was named as one of four winners of the DOD’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, which is expected to be worth $9 billion over the next six years. Microsoft Corp., Google LLC and Oracle Corp. also snatched up part of that contract. As with today’s deal, the JWWC contract is task-based, with individual agencies free to choose the cloud provider they believe is best suited for the skill set or service they need.
The JWWC contract is the successor to the DOD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, which aimed to contract a single vendor to provide cloud infrastructure capabilities to the entire US military for a 10-year period. Microsoft emerged victorious from that deal, but the decision was fiercely contested by AWS and Oracle, both of which made legal bids in protest. Ultimately, these challenges convinced the DOD to cancel the contract and reconsider its cloud computing plans.
What isn’t clear is whether the $723.9 million Navy contract forms part of the JWCC deal or is a separate award. However, the DOD said at the time that JWCC’s $9 billion budget should cap its cloud spending over the next five years.
AWS has had a lot of success in landing Megabucks cloud contracts from the US government. In 2020, it was selected as one of five winners of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise contract, said to be worth “tens of billions of dollars.” AWS is partnered with Microsoft, Oracle, Google and also IBM Corp. compete for work orders in connection with this contract.
Earlier this year, AWS won another $10 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the US National Security Agency. The original award of the contract was canceled after Microsoft protested, only to see AWS again as the sole winner after reviewing the award.
