South Bend company awarded $38M to expand Air Force cloud migration efforts
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A technology company in South Bend has secured a $38 million contract to expand and enhance its cloud managed services operation used by the United States Air Force.
Trek10 uses its CloudOps service to help the Air Force’s Business and Enterprise Systems Product Innovation, or BESPIN, migrate its applications to the cloud in a more efficient manner.
Trek10 was founded in 2013 and is an Amazon Web Services premier tier partner that helps businesses of all sizes, as well as the military, build and support their own cloud infrastructure.
President Jim Abercrombie told Inside INdiana Business the partnership with BESPIN started in 2019 after Trek10 won its first Air Force contract.
“Their early mission really was to help customers get their applications into Cloud One, which is one of the Air Force’s approved cloud environments,” Abercrombie said. “A lot of these environments predate the cloud, and so the transition isn’t always seamless. What we helped BESPIN do is a process to really move applications to the cloud…in as effective manner as possible.”
Trek10 said its CloudOps service allows BESPIN to build out what is will be known as the Air Force Mobile Center of Excellence. The goal is to scale cloud and mobile application development across the Air Force and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Abercrombie said the new contract is a huge milestone for the BESPIN ecosystem which, to date, has migrated between 30 and 40 applications to the cloud, which is only a small percentage of the applications that will be there by the end of the decade.
The contract was announced by the Air Force last week during South by Southwest in Austin, Texas.
The $38 million in funding comes from two sources. The first is $25 million in committed dollars from customers inside the Air Force, which is being matched with $12.7 million in Small Business Innovation Research funding from Strategic Funding Increase, or STRATFI, a program run by the Air Force’s small business office arm called AFWERX.
Abercrombie said the funding will be used to continue development of the BESPIN portal to streamline the process for everyone who uses it. It will also be enhanced so a wider variety of applications can be added to the cloud through the CloudOps service.
The team will also work to enhance the security of the service and provided advanced analytics and continuous monitoring, the company said.
Trek10 started with just one employee and has grown to about 75 today. But Abercrombie said, particularly as the new Air Force contract goes into effect, the company could see rapid growth in a short period of time.
“I believe this may be a little aggressive, but I think over the next five years, we could get up to about 500 jobs across the country,” he said, noting that as a remote-first company, they are in a good position to find the talent needed to fill those positions.
Abercrombie said he believes this is a time of transition as the Department of Defense incorporates more technology at a speed that hasn’t been seen for some time.
“Essentially, there’s a lot of change afoot, and I feel like we’re really well positioned to help support this important change that’s going to happen for the rest of the decade,” he said. “What I want to do is have Trek10 be in a position to support that however we can. That’s likely going to lead to growth; it might take us in directions that we aren’t even really imagining yet today. But there’s just a big opportunity coming.”