Amazon Web Services, Citrix Systems and startup Nutanix are formally protesting VMware’s proposed five-year, $1.6 billion enterprise licensing agreement with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), a branch of the Department Of Defense.

VMware’s proposed ELA is a joint agreement that covers the Army, Navy, Air Force, DISA and other DoD agencies. It seeks to combine support for more than 2 million VMware licenses and cut the administrative costs for 9,270 individual VMware procurement transactions over the previous five years, according to a DISA document outlining the scope of the ELA.

DISA issued a request for proposals on Feb. 9 and set a deadline of Feb. 23. But last week, DISA pushed back the deadline indefinitely to handle the large number of questions it fielded during the RFP period.

According to a report Monday from Nextgov, AWS, Citrix and Nutanix filed formal bid protests on Feb. 19 with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), on the grounds that VMware’s proposed ELA goes beyond the scope of a typical enterprise software licensing and support agreement.

Minburn Technology Group, a Great Falls, Va.-based Microsoft partner that sells enterprise licensing agreements to federal government agencies, is also protesting VMware’s ELA.

SOURCE: crn.com