2 DoD Cloud Contracts Total Nearly $1 Billion 

Migration of government agencies’ legacy applications to public clouds is a two-headed monster: one head is the procurement process, which can take months or years. The other is the actual technical work of IT migration.  REAN Cloud, a cloud systems integrator, has been picked by the Department of Defense to take on the monster, awarding the Herndon, VA-based company a contract that could ultimately be worth almost $1 billion.

The 300-employee firm was chosen from among 28 other firms competing for the lucrative contract. REAN is working with DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) – which is charged with accelerating commercial innovation to the U.S military – to expedite prototyping and procurement of cloud adoption, from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to application assessments, migrations and operations. DoD agencies will purchase cloud solutions and services from REAN Cloud in a streamlined process that, according to REAN, automates pricing and procurement.

Sekhar Puli, a REAN founder and managing partner, told EnterpriseTech that the total value of the contract could reach a $950 million ceiling, depending on how many “task orders” the company receives from DoD agencies. He said REAN is not a federal government contract specialist, it’s a managed services provider that supports the cloud services lifecycle for hyperscale customers in highly regulated environments – such as financial services, healthcare/life sciences, education and the public sector (clients include the American Heart Association, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Ditech Mortgage, Globus Genomics, Philips and SAP).

REAN and its Firm Fixed-Pricing (FFP) procurement system works in multiple public cloud environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud.

“With FFP and automated procurement, we are changing old mindsets of typical vendor relationships,” he said. “Our DoD customers can now achieve the same efficiencies available to the commercial sector as they seek to design, migrate, automate, manage and scale systems and databases running in the cloud.”

The five-year contract is modeled on a prototype developed by REAN last year for the U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), DoD’s first large-scale infrastructure assessment and cloud migration.

“By leveraging REAN Cloud’s platform, customers can shrink their transformation timeline from years to months,” said Sri Vasireddy, REAN Cloud managing partner.

In another DoD-related contract announcement today, CSRA of Falls Church, VA, a cloud services provider for federal health agencies, was selected for an $8.5 million award to provide Google Cloud computing services to the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences (USU).  The contract includes a blanket purchase agreement (BPA) that will support the USU with access to Google Cloud’s HIPAA-compliant G Suite and machine learning capabilities, along with access to AWS.

USU is a federal university under the direction of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs that trains health professionals, scientists, and leaders for service in the uniformed services.