Cloud Spending on The Chief Information Officer IT Commodities and Solutions GWAC

A marked transition toward using the General Service Administration’s IT Schedule 70 for cloud procurement has taken place over the last few years driven by the introduction of a new Special Item Number for cloud goods and services. Despite the dominance of Schedule 70, agencies also continue to use Government-Wide Acquisition Contracts like NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement (SEWP) V and the NIH’s Chief Information Officer IT Commodities and Solutions (CIO-CS). Today’s post takes a look at cloud procurement through CIO-CS over the last three fiscal years and examines trends in agency spending that provide insight into the federal cloud market as a whole.

Cloud Spending by Fiscal Year

Since its inception in fiscal 2015, total spending on CIO-CS has roughly tripled from $98M in fiscal 2015 to $304M in fiscal 2017. Cloud spending has increased too, just not at as rapid a rate. As the data below shows, total spending on cloud using CIO-CS amounts to $28.3M over three years.

The curious thing about this data is that spending in 2016 ramped up while spending in the cloud market as a whole – both as projected in agency reporting to the Office of Management and Budget and in Deltek-verified cloud contract spending data – declined that same fiscal year. For more details on these reported numbers see Deltek’s Federal Priorities Spotlight: Cloud Computing report. The spending uptrend stalled in fiscal 2017, however, with $146K less spent.

Spending by Agency

In terms of spending by agency, the chart below tells the tale.

Not surprisingly, the National Institutes of Health use their own vehicle the most, in addition to other Health and Human Services components like the Health Resources and Services Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The efforts NIH has spent the most on are Oracle Managed Cloud Services for HHS ($6.4M) and more than $4M for cloud-based Adobe capabilities. Adobe has quietly become a major player in the SaaS market.

Meanwhile, the remaining Civilian agencies that have used CIO-CS the most for cloud acquisitions are the National Archives and components of the Department of Agriculture. NARA’s spending focuses entirely on Enterprise IaaS/PaaS and Managed Services for Presidential Library and Museum Website Hosting. USDA’s spending has been for Cloud Migration Development ($2.4M) for the Farm Services Agency and AWS IaaS Services for the offices of the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer ($42K).

The only Department of Defense customer is the U.S. Navy, which spent $2.6M on Cloud Service Management with its integrator Red River Computer Company, the winner of  the cloud requirement spun off from the original NGEN-Recompete procurement.

Summing up by vendor solution provided, Oracle’s Managed Cloud service comes out on top with $6.5M in total earnings. They are followed by Adobe with $5.4M in earnings and AWS with $1.5M. Oracle has become an increasingly important competitor in the federal market, even though it is often overlooked by those focused on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Professional/Technical Services make up the greater part of spending altogether at $9.3M, illustrating the importance of migration services and cloud maintenance support in the market. This point provides a final observation that those competing in this market need to remember. It’s not just about _aaS; it’s about ancillary services related to cloud too.