The U.S. Navy will pay about $3.2 billion over 10 years to Microsoft resellers including Dell. Under the new purchase agreements, six vendors will provide Microsoft software licenses and subscriptions for the Department of Defense, U.S. intelligence community, and U.S. Coast Guard activities worldwide.

The Department of Defense says 895 vendors competed for the multi-billion award, but it only selected six. The lucky few are: CDWG Government, Dell Federal Systems, GovConnection, Insight Public Sector, Minburn Technology Group, and SHI International.

The blanket purchase agreement runs until Nov. 27, 2028. It covers commercial off-the-shelf products including desktop software, operating systems, virtualization, management tools, mobility, and software assurance.

This new award follows other major U.S. military wins for Microsoft. In September it scored a $34.4 million deal to provide enterprise IT-as-a-service for the U.S. Air Force. The contract doesn’t specify which products Microsoft will provide. Instead, the vendor will determine what software and hardware are best suited to solve the Air Force’s IT and networking needs over the three-year period.

In May Microsoft and Dell Technologies scored a six-year cloud contract “worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars” with the U.S. Intelligence Community, a multi-agency group made up of 17 government organizations.

And in September 2017 Microsoft, Dell EMC, and defense contractor General Dynamics won a $1 billion contract to move the U.S. Air Force’s IT and communications to the cloud.

JEDI Looms Large

But the big one — the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract, dubbed JEDI — still looms large. Amazon and Microsoft are considered frontrunners for the 10-year deal. The two cloud providers, along with IBM, Oracle, and possibly others, submitted proposals by the Oct. 12 deadline.

Microsoft President Brad Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have said they will offer alternative employment options for workers opposed to the company’s JEDI bid. The company also reportedly told military and intelligence agencies that it would sell them AI and any other technologies they needed “to build a strong defense.”

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Rachel E. Conrad/Released