IBM announced that the U.S. Army has signed a five-year, multi-million dollar contract with IBM to build, manage and operate a cloud solution for greater IT flexibility, efficiency and performance. Designed for the Army'sRedstone Arsenal, near Huntsville, Ala., the solution is part of the Army Private Cloud Enterprise (APCE) program, a one-year task order with four additional one-year options under the Army Private Cloud 2 (APC2) contract. If the Army exercises all options, the contract would be worth approximately $62 million over the five years. In addition to building the infrastructure, IBM will provide the Army with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services, enabling it to provision computing power on an as-needed basis for the most efficient and cost-effective IT. The Army also will begin migrating applications to the private cloud, moving up to 35 applications to the private cloud in the first year.