Late last week CloudTech reported that the state of California was moving to the cloud, thanks to a contract won by IBM, AT&T and KPMG. And according to George Cruser, general manager infrastructure for IBM Global Technology Services, it was a unique contract in the 25 years he’s done government work.

“It was kind of an interesting competitive bid because it was the standard government bid, and then they had a series of negotiations where they took two teams across and did day-long sessions with each team,” he tells CloudTech.

“We ended up doing four day-long sessions before being selected as the victor.

“I would say [it’s] the first time I’ve ever spent four days in live discussions with a government client, and the result was they knew exactly what they were getting, and they made adjustments to make sure they got what they wanted,” he adds.

The contract itself is at $37m, at five years open to all government entities within California. IBM said in a press release accompanying the launch that, alongside supplying and managing the infrastructure, it would “work closely with the state to transfer essential knowledge and best practices in security and systems integration to the Department of Technology.”

It’s like a private membership only cloud, and the state gets to choose who the members are

Cruser confirms this, adding: “One of the requirements was they would have a full understanding as opposed to just pure outsourcing.”

IBM confirmed that it was working with a couple of states “who were very much interested in the concept”, but couldn’t say any more than that. However Cruser adds: “California clearly is a leader, in showing that they’ve essentially built a private cloud for multi-tenant use.

“I view it somewhat as it’s a private membership only cloud, and the state gets to choose who the members are.

“At the moment they’ve said it’s going to be California government entities, all the way down through municipalities and local. In the future they can choose to extend it more broadly than that if they so desired.”

The future for CalCloud is adding platform as a service and software as a service capability to its infrastructure as a service offering at present. Cruser notes the advantages California holds as the shape of cloud computing changes.

“I think the beauty of it is all the things that we don’t know will be available in the next five years can be made available through this contract,” Cruser says. “As infrastructure grows, as platform grows, evolves and changes, software as a service evolves and changes, the state’s got a platform now in which to stay current.”

Elsewhere, IBM has announced with AT&T, its main network partner, and DARPA, a proof of concept technology that rapidly reduces set up times for cloud-to-cloud connectivity through software defined networking.