The General Services Administration (GSA) recently awarded 20 blanket purchase agreements to 17 companies allowing them to compete up to $2.5 billion in work over five years offering cloud email services to federal government customers.
The Email as a Service award supports the Obama administration’s directive to bring cloud computing services to the federal government to reduce federal data centers to bring down costs. The agency says the awards will streamline transition to the cloud for the federal government.
The awardees are: Accenture [ACN]; Autonomic Resources, LLC; CGI [GIB]; Ciracom Inc.; CSC [CSC]; Dell [DELL]; DLT Solutions; General Dynamics [GD]; Harris Corp. [HRS]; IBM [IBM]; Lockheed Martin [LMT]; Onix Networking Group; SAIC [SAI]; Smartronix Inc.; SRA International; Technosource, LLC; and Unisys [UIS].
GSA said that transitioning to a cloud email solution lowers the cost of email by up to 50 percent annually and saves $1 million for every 7,500 email boxes. The GSA was the first agency to transition its email to the cloud, doing so last year and generating $2 million in savings so far, the agency said.
GSA expects to save $15 million in information technology costs during five years from the transition.