The Pentagon on Wednesday announced a five-year, $9.69 billion agreement to consolidate Microsoft (MSFT.O), and other enterprise software licenses scattered across the military services, the intelligence community, and the U.S. Coast Guard into a single contract vehicle, officials said.
The cost-cutting effort hands Microsoft a guaranteed enterprise-wide foothold across the U.S. armed forces while squeezing out duplicative spending that officials said had quietly ballooned across years of fragmented, go-it-alone procurement.