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Curt Kolcun: Army to Purchase 50K Microsoft Office 365 Licenses

Curt Kolcun,  Microsoft
Curt Kolcun, Microsoft

The U.S. Army has awarded a blanket purchase agreement to Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) for 50, 000 Office 365 licenses that will be available to all Defense Department components.

Office 365 encompasses shared email and calendar tools, Office Web Apps, Microsoft Lync and collaboration tools such as SharePoint,  Curt Kolcun, vice president of Microsoft’s U.S. public sector, wrote in a blog post published Monday.

“All DoD services, agencies and mission partners will be able to use an on premises, cloud or hybrid solution to best meet their needs, ” Kolcun wrote.

Kolcun’s announcement comes nearly a month after Susie Adams,  Microsoft’s federal chief technology advisor, unveiled the company’s new cloud platform designed exclusively for government customers (click here for our coverage).

Through the BPA, Microsoft intends to work with civilian and other federal entities at all levels to use commercial cloud services and to work toward new mobile opportunities, Kolcun wrote.

DoD moved to its new email system in order to use a single authoritative identity management tool and to better posture itself to acquire Office 365 and other enterprise products, according to Kolcun.

The Army intends for the purchase to build on DoD’s transition to a cloud-based email system and to combine both commercial and government cloud services, Kolcun says.

Kolcun adds that more than one million U.S. public sector employees use Office 365, including federal workers at the Agriculture Department,  Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Aviation Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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