The US Army has a new recruit, Hewlett-Packard. Today, the Palo Alto company has announced that it has signed a $249 million contract to provide the Department of Defense and other federal agencies with enterprise level cloud computing services.

The new move will let the military stabilize its existing data centers and, the services will be deployed to a large number of commercial government owned buildings. Coupled with this, HP will provide the military with Performance-Optimized Data Centers (PODs) for swift deployment into tactical situations. Under the terms of the Army Private Cloud contract, HP will work alongside ten small businesses and Alabama A&M University to help actualize the private cloud and its requirements.