(Microsoft Photo)

Microsoft started off the year with two wins in the federal government sector, winning a $1.76 billion contract with the Department of Defense for software development services and a new certification for its Outlook mobile app.

The five-year contract was announced Friday evening and will see Microsoft provide “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,” according to the announcement. The Department of Defense, Coast Guard, and intelligence community are included in the deal.

And on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that the mobile version of Outlook has been deemed worthy of use by government employees using its US Government Community Cloud (GCC) High services as well as Department of Defense employees subject to “Department of Defense Security Requirements Guidelines, Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement (DFARS), and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR),” it said in a blog post.

The five-year Pentagon contract is surely a nice win for Microsoft’s enterprise team, it doesn’t appear to include any Azure cloud services that would be part of the ten-year $10 billion JEDI cloud contract for which Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are the only realistic front-runners. Winning that deal could unlock a lot of other business with the federal government, which spends billions on information technology services.

The JEDI contact is expected to be awarded in April or May, assuming a functioning U.S. government still exists at that point. The DoD has set out strict requirements for the types of cloud services it will require the winner of that bid to provide, which means the five-year contract just awarded doesn’t necessarily imply that the DoD believes Microsoft is equipped to handle the bigger project.

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