Agencies on a roller coaster ride with cloud spending

Grazed from FederalNewsRadio. Author: Jason Miller.

Sometimes covering the federal IT community is like a bad roller coaster. The buildup when going up the big hill is exciting and stomach churning. But when the downhill falls flat, you feel a little cheated. That’s the feeling today when it comes to cloud computing. You can’t shake a stick at a conference without someone mentioning the need to the cloud. The crucial role software-, platform-, infrastructure-as-a-service play and will continue to play in the future of federal IT always is hot topic.

But then Deltek’s GovWin puts out a report that is like that flat roller coaster ride. GovWin, a market research firm, looked at preliminary federal procurement data for fiscal 2016 that shows spending on cloud computing hasn’t lived up to its hype. GovWin found civilian agencies have awarded $75.4 million in cloud contracts in 2016 and the Defense Department, its services and agencies awarded $45.3 million in 2016…

We have to take into account that these numbers DO NOT include fourth quarter spending for DoD, as military procurement reporting usually is three months behind. For example, the Army made a $62 million award to IBM for a private cloud toward the end of 2016 that’s not included in GovWin’s numbers…

Read more from the source @ http://federalnewsradio.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2016/10/agencies-roller-coaster-ride-cloud-spending/