America’s Army Drafts IBM’s Cloud

Computing giant IBM said today that it has secured a deal that will bring its hybrid cloud computing services to a division of the U.S. Army.

The deal will put IBM’s cloud at the center of the Army’s Logistics Support Activity, known in the service as Logsa, a system that supports the operations and activities of all U.S. Army personnel around the world. It will combine an IBM-managed system with hardware that Army personnel will manage in a so-called hybrid cloud approach. Logsa keeps track of all the information needed to supply, equip and maintain every aspect of the U.S. Army’s operations around the world.

It’s a big win for IBM, which has pledged to bring in $7 billion in cloud revenue this year. The company has recently built two major data centers dedicated strictly to serving federal agencies.

Big Blue has at times found itself on the losing end of cloud services contracts with federal agencies. Two years ago it put up a big fight after losing a contract to build a special cloud computing installation for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Amazon Web Services, the Web retailer’s cloud computing unit, won that deal. About the same time, IBM decided to spend about $2 billion to acquire the cloud computing company SoftLayer, which has since become the central pillar of its cloud strategy.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.