USAF awards $1 billion Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services contract

In what is described as the largest-ever federal cloud-based unified communications and collaboration contract, the U.S. Air Force awarded a five-year, $1 billion contract to Dell EMC, General Dynamics and Microsoft.

Under the contract, the three partners will implement a Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) program aimed at improving efficiency and agility, encouraging innovation, and generating cost savings across the Air Force’s information technology enterprise.

Dell EMC, General Dynamics and Microsoft have also been instrumental in the Air Force's IT transformation initiative, which was launched in 2015 and included deployment of Microsoft Office 365 including email, productivity tools and communications. Over 140,000 users have been migrated to this cloud platform over the past two years. CHES is the follow-on to that program.

The task order was awarded by the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service in Denver.