Dell EMC and its industry partners, General Dynamics and Microsoft, were awarded a $1 billion five-year US Air Force contract to implement a Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services CHES programme, in September 2017. It will improve efficiency and agility, encourage innovation, and generate cost savings across the Air Force’s information technology enterprise.
The contract includes Dell EMC Consulting Services for migrating the communications and collaboration systems, as well as application profiling services to assess applications for cloud suitability, migration or retirement. Dell EMC consultants have years of experience handling enterprise-scale migrations and helping customers achieve their business objectives by combining automated tools, Microsoft subject-matter expertise and proven methodologies.
The Air Force launched its IT transformation initiative in 2015 with Collaboration Pathfinder, deploying Microsoft Office 365 including email, productivity tools and communications. Dell, Microsoft and General Dynamics Information Technology were awarded that contract, and more than 140,000 users have been migrated over the past two years.
CHES is the follow-on to that program, but with a far wider scope, making it the largest-ever federal cloud-based unified communications and collaboration contract in the federal marketplace. The task order was awarded by the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service in Denver.
Enterprise-as-a-Service delivered through cloud has long been a top-level priority for the Department of Defense, and the Dell EMC solution meets that requirement. Under CHES, information, communications, email, collaboration services, office productivity and records management will be provided for up to 776,000 users.
The Defense Logistics Agency and the US Army Corps of Engineers will be among additional government users to benefit from CHES. The objective is to roll out the entire programme in under a year, a schedule that will allow the services to focus on their core mission and reduce costs as data centers are consolidated under this effort.