This is the strange, slightly surreal world in which Amazon has decided to land. “They definitely moved to Crystal City to be closer to the Pentagon,” says William D. Hartung, security expert at the Center for International Policy and author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.”
While not yet a contracting powerhouse on the scale of Raytheon, Amazon has embraced the military far more closely and eagerly than its Silicon Valley peers. Its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, has a client in the Central Intelligence Agency, in a contract worth $600 million.
Last year, Amazon announced the creation of a new branch of Amazon Web Services that would provide “the U.S. Intelligence Community a commercial cloud capability across all classification levels: Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret.”
Good speculations from Yahoo on whether Amazon is turning into Lockheed. Well, maybe more like Boeing, which has a big commercial sector that will be cleanly separated from its government work.
Here is Amazon working with Lockheed on a DOD project, who announced a
…strategic collaboration to integrate the new AWS Ground Station service with Lockheed Martin’s new Verge antenna network. AWS and Lockheed Martin are bringing these two highly capable systems together to provide a solution that addresses customer needs for resilient satellite uplinks and downlinks. Through this integration, customers using AWS Ground Station gain the ability to download data from multiple satellites at the same time and to continue downloading data even when unplanned outages like a weather event impact parts of the network.
“AWS and Lockheed Martin have a long, deep relationship and over the past several years it’s become apparent that together we could bring greater capabilities to our public sector and commercial customers,” said Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector for AWS.
Yes, the JEDI contract would be a big win for Amazon as a DOD prime, but a lot of growth will have to come from teaming with defense industry incumbents. Yet if this happens, would this be the first big entry into the US defense market since… well… the 1950s maybe? Does anyone know?
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