Booz Allen, AWS forge deeper alliance to speed federal modernization

Booz Allen Hamilton’s new partnership with Amazon Web Services is a next step in the evolution of their decade-long partnership.

But with the Trump administration’s focus on efficiency, they see the timing as near-perfect.

“If we take the lens of the new administration as an accelerator and the DOGE specifically as an accelerator for changes that we’ve advocated for many years, I think those are good things,” said Julie McPherson, executive vice president and leader of Booz Allen's digital solutions business.

For Booz Allen and AWS, their new five-year pact is all about acceleration and bringing new solutions to their government customers. This is also the largest and deepest relationship that Booz Allen has forged with any commercial technology company.

“Over the last 12 months we’ve focused on how we enhance our role as a trusted partner,” McPherson said. “The partnership itself is multi-layered.”

The two companies have signed a master services agreement that gives Booz Allen some early access to AWS initiatives and developments.

“We are focused on scaling up our expertise, building reusable toolkits and training our talent on the latest technologies and techniques coming out of AWS itself,” McPherson said.

The new agreement designates Booz Allen as the premier launch partner for AWS' generative AI innovation center. The partnership will focus on cloud migration, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, edge computing and high-performance computing.

Both companies have also committed to co-invest in solutions for critical government challenges.

“We have no shortage of big ideas right now that we are working through,” she said. “We have some really challenging opportunities in front of us – the government, the nation – and we think that we can create more speed and improve outcome if we work together.”

Neither Booz Allen or AWS is ready to identify those areas yet, but McPherson said engineers at both companies will work together.

Booz Allen employees will also get early access to training from AWS, particularly in generative AI.

“Our employees will get training on the latest and greatest even before there are certification programs in place,” she said. “That’s going to pay dividends for us.”

Additional training in areas such as cloud migration will become available to more Booz Allen employees, she said.

“One of the things I’m excited about is building solutions that scale to the size of the government and to do so rapidly,” she said. “That’s an opportunity we see across all of government.”

McPherson said the Trump administration’s focus on speed and efficiency should result in an acceleration toward more outcome-based procurements, which she believes will create opportunities across the contracting market.

“We have to recognize that it is a dynamic environment with executive orders coming fast and furious. We are constantly evaluating them,” she said. “It’s all happening really rapidly, and I think if we stay focused on the prize, which is acceleration, it’s going to be fun but busy.”