IBM and others will earn $1 billion each on state locks in the United States

In August 2013, it became known that IBM, AT&T, Verizon, including a total of about 10 largest IT companies, can receive $1 billion each, participating in a large-scale program for the implementation of cloud services, the implementation of which was planned by the Department of Internal Affairs (DOI) of the United States.

The total DOI budget for migrating your own IT infrastructure to the cloud is about $10 billion, it plans to divide it into ten contracts. For 2013, this is one of the largest IT initiatives of the American government in the field of cloud computing.

By splitting the project into separate contracts, the government intends to avoid overcharging, which could happen if the services of one provider are used, and achieve healthier competition among contractors, Andrew Jackson, one of the department's IT officials, said in an official blog.

Among the ten companies that signed the contracts are IBM, AT&T, Verizon, Unisys, Lockheed Martin, Aquilent, Smartronix, CGI Group, Autonomous Resources and Global Technology Resources.

Despite the fact that the Department will spend about $10 billion under these contracts, officials expect to achieve savings through the introduction of cloud solutions. According to preliminary estimates, IT costs will decrease annually by $100 million per year between 2016 and 2020. These funds will be used for new projects.

Another task of the project is to ensure greater accessibility of the Department's data to its own employees, as well as ordinary US citizens. This is one of the parts of the US plan to reform government IT, consisting of 25 points (the exact name is Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT, the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative and the Cloud-First Policy).