Dell EMC and its partners, General Dynamics and Microsoft have won a $1 billion five-year U.S. Air Force contract to implement a Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) program.
The objective of the cloud project is to improve efficiency and agility, encourage innovation, and generate cost savings across the Air Force’s information technology enterprise.
Earlier, Dell EMC announced a major contract from GE.
Dell EMC in a statement said the Air Force launched its IT transformation initiative in 2015 with Collaboration Pathfinder, deploying Microsoft Office 365 including email, productivity tools and communications.
Dell, Microsoft and General Dynamics Information Technology, who were the partners of that IT contract, migrated more than 140,000 users over the past two years. CHES is the follow-on to that program, but with a far wider scope, making it the largest-ever federal cloud-based unified communications and collaboration contract in the federal marketplace.
Department of Defense is considering Dell EMC solution for enterprise-as-a-service delivered through cloud. Under CHES, IT partners will provide information, communications, email, collaboration services, office productivity and records management for up to 776,000 users.
The Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be among additional government users to benefit from CHES. The objective is to roll out the entire program in under a year, a schedule that will allow the services to focus on their core mission and reduce costs as data centers are consolidated under this effort.
The contract includes Dell EMC Consulting Services for migrating the communications and collaboration systems, as well as application profiling services to assess applications for cloud suitability, migration or retirement.
Steve Harris, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC Federal; Dan Busby, vice president and general manager, General Dynamics Information Technology Global Solutions Division; and Leigh Madden, general manager, U.S. Defense, Microsoft were instrumental in signing the contract.
