Verizon to participate in Dept. of Interior's $10B cloud-hosting contract

August 19, 2013 | By Sean Buckley

L K Consulting is proud to be a Verizon, CenturyLink, and at&t Solutions provider 

Verizon Enterprise Solutions, the business services arm of Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ), has been invited to participate in the U.S. Department of the Interior's $10 billion, 10-year Foundation Cloud Hosting Services contract.

Verizon is one of 10 companies that will compete for cloud-based storage, secure file transfer, virtual machine, and database, Web, and development and test environment hosting services projects.

Each of these 10 agreements will be worth $1 billion.

This could be one of the largest federal cloud contracts Verizon has been awarded to date.  In addition, the telco is one of four companies the agency selected to provide SAP application hosting services.

During the four-year contract--which will run from 2016 to 2020, and can be extended through April 2023--the agency said it expects to save $100 million a year.

Following the General Services Administration's (GSA) Cloud First mandate, this contract will enable the Department of the Interior to achieve two goals: to modernize how it manages applications and stores data, and to cut costs by reducing its data center footprint.

All nine of the department's technical bureaus and all seven administrative offices covering over 2,400 locations and 70,000 employees will be able to get services from this contract. Interior expects other federal departments and agencies will use the contract to purchase cloud services.

Other participating companies in the contract include AT&T (NYSE: T), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Lockheed Martin, and Unisys.

Like other large federal services contracts, work on this project was delayed by a protest from CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), which was not awarded a seat on the cloud contract. The telco, reports Bloomberg, sued the government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, arguing that "the Interior Department's price and technical evaluation criteria were unreasonable."