GSA, DoD award $7.6B cloud DEOS contract for email, collaboration

The mega cloud contract that is not called JEDI went off without a hitch—so far.

The General Services Administration and the Defense Department today announced it awarded the 10-year, $7.6 billion DEOS contract to a team led by CSRA, now known as General Dynamics IT. The company, which also runs the MilCloud 2.0 program, is partnering with Dell Marketing LP and Minburn Technology Group LLC under the blanket purchase agreement on top of Schedule 70.

Under the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS), the Pentagon will implement Microsoft Office 365 and associated capabilities including word processing and spreadsheets, email, collaboration, file sharing and storage.

“DoD’s cloud strategy includes both general purpose and fit-for-purpose clouds. DEOS is a great example of a fit-for-purpose cloud that supports our multi-cloud strategy,” said DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy in a statement. “DEOS will streamline our use of cloud email and collaborative tools while enhancing cybersecurity and information sharing based on standardized needs and market offerings.”

The contract still could be protested by the unsuccessful bidders, but the program got this far without any pre-solicitation complaints. Alan Thomas, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, said in July that there was adequate competition.

Still unlike the DoD’s other mega cloud contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) program, which has been mired in controversy and protests for the last 18 months, DEOS, generally speaking, has sailed through the acquisition process.

DoD says DEOS will replace legacy office applications with a standard cloud-based capability across all military services.

DoD and GSA, which served as the acquisition arm of the contract, released the RFP for DEOS in May but began planning for the contract in October 2018. DEOS is replacing the Defense Enterprise Email Service run by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

“All lessons learned from pilot programs and the department’s early cloud adopters have been rolled into this solution. DEOS takes advantage of technical, security and contractual lessons from these ongoing pilots, while military services are leveraging them to assess the readiness of their infrastructure to support migration to DEOS,” said Deasy.

DISA said last year that it wants to start migrating the department’s first users – about 1.5 million of them – within 18 months of the DEOS award.

Among the first users of O365 platform will be the Navy and the Marines Corps.

Ken Bible, the Marines Corps deputy director for Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (C4), said in a statement that the corps expects significant benefits from DEOS.

“We are hopeful that it will supply the ability to operate within the disconnected, degraded, intermittent and low bandwidth (DDIL) environments that are anticipated in 21st century conflicts,” he said. “The Marine Corps continues to forge a path with our Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, or Limited Bandwidth (DDIL) pilot, shaping the services’ strategies for DEOS to more closely align with current technological trends and advancements as cloud continues to be the industry standard.”

The Navy, meanwhile, has been looking toward DEOS for the back-office productivity capabilities since 2017.

In many ways, DEOS also will act as a pilot or proof-of-concept of sorts for civilian agencies. GSA and the Office of Management and Budget have said they plan to use the lessons learned from DEOS to create a similar contract vehicle for civilian agencies.