How eager is Amazon.com to get government to use its cloud computing services? Very eager. Shortly after President Obama's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, announced a new website to help federal agencies shop for cloud-based IT services, Amazon was out making a big sales push to government officials.

From Amazon CTO Werner Vogels' blog:

Since the launch of those first AWS services, more than 3.5 years ago, we have seen companies of every size, from startups to fortune 100 companies, from innovative media companies to efficient financial services organizations to large scale pharmaceutical companies be able to focus more and more on delivering value to their customers because of the use of our cloud services. We are excited and looking forward to counting the Federal Government among our customers and helping them achieve their goals.

Federal CIO Kundra today announced apps.gov, an "online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services, for productivity, collaboration, and efficiency." Kundra says the U.S. government spends more than $75 billion annually on information technology, and believes it can save taxpayer money by moving some IT functions to the cloud.

Amazon has been quietly building a presence in Washington, D.C., as it tries to attract government agencies and their big IT budgets to its cloud platform. The company hired an ex-FBI computer security expert and has been holding seminars, among other things.

One interesting note: the local DC government made use of Amazon Web Services for extra website capacity during the Obama inauguration. DC's chief technology officer at the time was none other than Vivek Kundra, who went on to become Obama's CIO and is now promoting the cloud to government.

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