| Let's do some math. So, this is a $927,000,000 five year contract. Right? So let's tell the government not to pay talented companies to provide services and instead hire federal employees to build out infrastructure to do the same thing. Assuming we have kind of a $200,000/year base salary for the types of people we need (so like a GS-15 or so), how much does that cost the government over the same time span? $1,000,000/employee. So you would prefer the government hire 927 people full time for five years to completely replace MS? Do you think they'll do a good job? Is $200,000 salary a good deal, or will you end up hiring bad software developers at that rate? Can you hire better developers for $400,000/year? Can 464 people build a MS replacement in 5 years? Also, who will support it? Do we need to factor that in as well? Will we have to replace this new OS/tech stack in 5 years? Is that another billion dollars? I suspect that you're looking at the price and being blown away by the number. The DoD spends $580 billion each year (roughly). Are there any comparable companies with a $580 billion/year run rate? Expand your mind, friend. This is a bargain price for the government. You should do some digging and try to find out how much DISA is paying for their own version of AWS. I suspect that number will blow your mind as well. |
I work on a small team of about 12 within 18F (part of the General Services Administration). We are creating cloud.gov, a Platform as a Service (think Heroku, Google App Engine, IBM Bluemix) for the Federal Government. The key is to remove the government compliance burden from federal government development teams while also making modern technology accessible and understandable.
We come from private sector for a two year civil service. We are super lean and all of our work is open source (github.com/18F).
Note that cloud.gov is only seeking certification for FISMA Moderate impact level, so a lot of DoD systems (such as anything classified) cannot be hosted on our PaaS.