EEOC Federal Agency Expects 40% Savings Using Cloud

By John Duckgeischel

The Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has predicted that the agency will save over 40% during the next five year period as it transitions its financial management application to a cloud computing vendor. The winning vendor in the competitive bidding process was Global Computer Enterprises (GCE) of Reston, Virginia. The five year contract for $10 million follows after GCE won a similar contract with the Department of Labor, which included 12 sub-agencies and offices, in 2010. "We're not ones to break new ground," commented Jeff Smith, CFO of the EEOC, which enforces anti-discrimination laws in American workplaces. "It was important to us that the Department of Labor had already done this with GCE from a past-performance point of view. We had some comfort that they had done this successfully in the required time frame at Labor."

Meanwhile the Federal Office of Management and Budget is encouraging many federal agencies to transition to cloud computing service providers as a means to reduce costs and to speed up IT system deployments. The U.S. government’s CIO Vivek Kundra released the federal cloud computing strategy report which takes a cloud-first approach to computing. According to Federal government estimates, the current Federal IT expenditures of $80 billion per year, could be reduced by approximately $20 billion by outsourcing to cloud computing vendors. The EEOC contract marks the first case where a federal agency has adopted a cloud computing approach for a mission-critical application involving financial management. Previous government contracts for cloud computing have centered around e-mail and web-based collaboration applications.

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