The Department of Defense announced Monday that it is substantially modifying the terms of a nearly $1 billion agreement it made with an Amazon partner company to transition agency data to the cloud.
The original agreement, signed in February, tasked Rean Cloud, LLC with enabling multiple agencies within the Defense Department to procure cloud solutions in a new streamlined process, but was immediately criticized by some in industry who feared the Pentagon was playing favorites.
In a protest to the Government Accountability Office, Oracle claimed that Rean “serves as a front for Amazon Web Services” and that the entire procurement process was “shrouded in secrecy.” Rean is an Amazon Web Services partner and reseller.
Defense Department spokesman Col. Robert Manning announced March 5 that the contract’s new ceiling will be $65,000,000, a significant reduction from the original five-year $950,000,000 and that the scope of the work will be limited.
“After reviewing the production agreement recently awarded to Rean Cloud LLC, the Department has determined that the agreement should be more narrowly tailored to the original scope of the prototype agreement, which was limited to United States Transportation Command applications,” Manning said.
Moving the Department more fully into the cloud has been a top priority for the Pentagon’s senior leaders, including Patrick Shanahan, the deputy secretary of defense.
Working with Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, Rean Cloud successfully completed the Defense Department’s first large-scale cloud migration and adoption project for U.S. Transportation Command last year.
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