The return of the Jedi is coming.
Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi will enter the cloud and use the force.
Not the Jedi of the famous George Lucas films, but JEDI - Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure commissioned by the Department of Defense.
This large contract is up for grabs.
Rumor has it that Amazon is in the driver's seat to become the government's right-hand man.
The purpose of this broad-based upgrade is to enhance communication channels among military branches by loading up operations into the cloud.
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning will be integrated as well.
One task slated for modernization includes the heaps of documents waiting to be translated from Arabic, Farsi, Chinese and other foreign languages into English.
A.I. will organize which documents have priority over others as well as aiding in raw translation. This will save the Department of Defense's overworked linguists thousands of hours in brute translation work.
As it stands, the government is grappling with an overlapping fractious system with legacy software up to 20 years old.
These legacy systems of yore are poor at keeping out the cyber criminals looking for a smash-and-data grab.
One instance where massive inefficiencies rear its ugly head is in the Department of Agriculture.
This department has 22 chief information officers that require seven more personal assistants inflating the IT budget.
The government could become the best turnaround story in the tech industry in years.
This turnaround could eventually become bigger than Microsoft and Cisco, which are the poster children for extreme cosmetic surgery in Silicon Valley.
The government burns $90 billion per year servicing IT operations, and JEDI is slated to offer an attractive sum of $100 billion over 10 years to a private company.
Not only will the Department of Defense modernize, but every part of the government will adopt new technologies.
Security is a priority for this administration after its legitimacy was questioned due to alleged nefarious Russian involvement.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has buckled down rejecting a myriad of attempted foreign takeovers of cutting-edge tech companies stressing the need to properly harness local tech companies' ingenuity to the benefit of the country.
These new opportunities do not affect the already $1 billion per quarter that Alphabet (GOOGL) takes in from government servicing.
The $1 billion contract was given to Alphabet to develop the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team industrially working on Project Maven.
Project Maven is the Department of Defense's attempt to integrate A.I. and machine learning into motion detector technology applied to surveillance drones using the Google cloud.
Project Maven received an additional boost to its objectives with an additional $100 million cash injection recently underlining the government's efforts to make warfare more efficient and less expensive.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has also carved out a nice $5 billion per quarter business thanks to the power brokers in Washington.
Another side deal consummated recently has thrust Microsoft into the frame as well.
Microsoft (MSFT) agreed with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to service 17 intelligence agencies with the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
The deal was reported to be valued at "hundreds of million" of dollars.
Another separate deal agreed by both parties has Microsoft migrating another 3.4 million users and 4 million devices from the Department of Defense into the cloud.
All told, Microsoft has pulled in more than $1.3 billion of orders from the government in the past five years.
Bill Gates's old company was rewarded certification to supply the government with computers, operating systems, Microsoft Office, and the cloud services bolstering their credentials to potentially extract more government business.
The administration has adopted a winner takes all approach to the JEDI contract preferring one cloud provider to maintain the infrastructure.
Companies are scratching and clawing to get within a shout of winning this valuable revenue stream that could extrapolate down the road.
JEDI accounts for just 20% of the cloud possibilities for the tech companies in the government system.
The further 80% of digitization will happen down the road.
Firms are up in arms about the single platform solution and believe branching out to multiple platforms will come in use if part of the operation goes down.
Hybrid solutions are the norm for 80% of Fortune 500 companies.
As it is, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), Alphabet, Amazon (AMZN), and Microsoft have been adamant that they are the best candidates for the job.
Amazon has been on a one-man mission mobilizing its all-star team of lobbyists to gain an edge.
Amazon has been part of the government's purse strings for quite some time.
It was awarded a $600 million contract in 2013.
Secretary of Defense James Mattis spoke about the relationship with Amazon in glowing terms characterizing Amazon's performance as "impressive" in terms of securing data and functionality.
The positive Amazon feedback has given AWS a head start. It hopes to capitalize on the biggest transfer of data to the cloud in modern history.
Once completed, departments will at last be able to access files from different branches on the same platform. This process is currently done manually.
Quickening the pace of modernization is a prerogative for the new administration.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order to spur on the process of getting rid of the decaying system.
Son-in-law Jared Kushner has also been an advocate of the agonizing overhaul.
This bold initiative ties in well with enhancing cybersecurity inside Washington at a time when hackers have penetrated legacy systems with ease.
Getting the White House up and running will improve the operation of the government. From an investor's point of view, it will add materially to the bottom line of companies that start to win more contracts.
This underscores the reliance of our government and economy on the large cap tech companies that are single-handedly propping up the current bull market.
The White House will wake up one day and understand that technology innovation is more powerful than ever, and even the mayhem inside the White House can't stop the digitization of politics.
Going forward Amazon and Microsoft should get a healthy boost to their overflowing coffers. Legacy companies such as IBM and Oracle could be punished by the government as well as investors for being legacy companies, which could lead the government to pass over IBM and Oracle.
Yes Mr. President ... An Upgrade Is Needed
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Quote of the Day
"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." - said Michael Dell in 1997, the founder of Dell Technologies, when asked what he would do if he was in charge of Apple.
