IBM Inks U.S. Dept. of Interior Cloud Deal, Trusteer Acquisition

IBM (IBM) continues to build its cloud empire with two new deals announced this week: a contract win with the United States Department of the Interior (DOI) and the acquisition of fraud protection software vendor Trusteer.

First, IBM’s agreement with the DOI. The agency awarded IBM a 10-year indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, valued up to $1 billion which allows the DOI and other U.S. government agencies, to leverage IBM cloud computing technologies, services and hosting. Sound familiar?

That may be because cloud provider, integrator and defense contractor Lockheed Martin (LMT) announced last week that it scored a cloud contract with the the DOI, valued up to $1 billion. And IBM and Lockheed Martin were not alone; eight other suppliers were grouped into this same deal, which is worth a total of $10 billion.

In addition to IBM’s announced partnership with the DOI, Big Blue also disclosed its acquisition of fraud protection software vendor Trusteer to further the company’s investment in cloud-delivered software and services. The financial terms of the deal were not released to the public.

As a result of this deal, IBM said it will be forming a cybersecurity software lab in Israel, an addition to IBM’s existing research and development facilities, that will bring together more than 200 Trusteer and IBM researchers and developers to focus on mobile and application security, advanced threat, malware, counter-fraud and financial crimes.

IBM Security Systems Division General Manager Brendan Hannigan said in a prepared statement that the acquisition will assist IBM’s clients with constantly evolving threats from growing malware.

“Together with IBM’s capabilities in advanced threat detection, analysis and remediation, we will now be able to offer our clients several additional layers of defense against sophisticated attackers,” he said.

Big Blue said Trusteer will bring the following capabilities to the IBM security portfolio: security as a service delivered through the cloud, comprehensive counter-fraud and advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, and secure mobile transactions.

These two deals this week come even as IBM is undergoing an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of how it reports cloud revenue.

IBM has said it expects cloud revenue to reach $7 billion by 2015 and that cloud revenue has grown by 70 percent in the first half of 2013.