Cloud Vendors Protest Big Uncle Sam VMware Military IT Deal

The US government has announced plans to create a new military contract with VMWare for £1.03 billion, dropping its long-term contract with Virtzilla.

VMWare won’t get away that easy however, as Amazon Web Services, Citrix and Nutanix have all complained to the government for separate reasons.

The current deal includes all of the US agencies, including US Army, Navy, Air Force, Defence Information Systems Agency, to sign one deal with VMWare, cutting over 9000 procurement transactions.

This is a big deal for the US government. If it buys from VMWare alone it could save a lot of time when it comes to paperwork, but it would also leave all of the other services in the dark.

A similar move happened to Amazon Web Services when it won its own government contract, being labelled by IBM and Microsoft as all sorts of nonsense.

VMWare’s server and desktop virtualisation is critical for governments, who need more space to store private information and a range of devices to work from at one time.

Amazon Web Services claim the adoption of full VMWare services limits the ability other companies can have in winning over the government, especially once the government gets used to the VMWare technology.

Government contracts are incredibly lucrative for business-to-business companies, since they normally run on rather old systems already and offer billions in contract deals.

Several providers fight over servers, computers and all other hardware and software opportunities, and almost always someone decides to file a complaint when they lose.

Author: David Curry