Agriculture reopens cloud integration pacts for bids
Thomas Winz / The Image Bank via Getty Images
By
Ross Wilkers
Stratus is the Agriculture Department's one-stop cloud acquisition vehicle that other government agencies can also place orders against.
The Agriculture Department is now ready to start adding more companies for the integration and development portion of Stratus, a centralized procurement for driving cloud computing adoption across the entire enterprise.
In the spring of 2024, Agriculture chose 37 companies for a set of 10-year basic ordering agreements under the second pool of Stratus and geared those awards largely to technology system integrators.
Agriculture will accept quotes for the Stratus Pool 2 on-ramp through July 11. Comments and questions are due no later than June 20, Agriculture said in a Friday notice to release the final solicitation.
Stratus is set up to provide Agriculture and other government entities a single pathway for acquiring cloud brokerage services, hosting capabilities, sources of supply for commercial cloud landing zones and enterprise data offerings.
The overall Stratus procurement has no ceiling value, but the size and specs of the requirement suggest a sizeable opportunity set for the awardees.
Pool 2 covers services across different aspects of cloud integration, including migration, security, architecture, governance, strategy, platform operations, continuous integration and identity and access management.
Following the initial Pool 2 awards, Agriculture selected 12 resellers and other providers of software-as-a-service products for Pool 3 of Stratus. Agriculture set up Pool 3 to act primarily as a mechanism for acquiring enterprise licenses.
Pool 1 is the portion of Stratus that is almost exclusively for the global hyperscale providers. Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft were awarded their positions on it over the course of 2024.