Microsoft has just won a massive new customer for its enterprise services. The US Department of Defense announced last week last week that it has signed a five-year $1.76 billion deal with Microsoft, in which Redmond will provide enterprise services for the Department of Defense (DoD), Coast Guard, and intelligence community (via ZDNet).
“Support includes Microsoft product engineering services for software developers and product teams to leverage a range of proprietary resources and source-code, and Microsoft premier support for tools, knowledge database, problem resolution assistance, and custom changes to Microsoft source-code when applicable,” the Pentagon explained in a statement.
While the five-year service deals is very good news for the Redmond giant, the timing for the announcement is also quite interesting as Microsoft is still in the race to win the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract. As the DoD is currently planning a major revamp of its IT infrastructure, and announced last year that it would sign a single contract for all of those services. Microsoft recently touted an expansion of its Azure Government Secret cloud service for handling Top Secret U.S. classified data, and is fighting hard for the JEDI contract. The Pentagon is expected to announce the winner for the JEDI contract in Q1 2019.
