Flickr photo via boboroshi

As Google, Microsoft and other technology companies talk up their ability to provide cloud computing services to federal agencies, another tech giant, Amazon.com, is quietly positioning itself to be a major government cloud provider as well.

The Seattle-based online retailer has been characteristically secretive about its efforts in Washington. But the company, still better known for its e-commerce website than its cloud offerings, is making some progress engaging with federal agencies.

Amazon’s ability to sell cloud services to the federal government could open up a huge new market for the company.

The online retailer was an early leader in cloud computing — selling computing power from its data centers on an as-needed basis via the internet. Such services got early traction with startups and individual web developers. Now Amazon and its competitors are targeting government agencies and large enterprises, which have much bigger computing needs and deeper pockets.

The potential size of the federal cloud market is mind-boggling. The government has a $76 billion information technology budget, including $20 billion for infrastructure. Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and other Obama administration officials are making a big push for agencies to shift some applications, such as e-mail, to the cloud to reduce the cost of government operations.

In a sign of Amazon’s interest in the federal cloud market, the company last year teamed with Apptis, a Chantilly, Va.-based government IT services company, to respond to a request for quotes by the U.S. General Services Administration. The GSA was seeking information on “infrastructure-as-a-service” offerings, including cloud storage, virtual machines and cloud web hosting.

The GSA later canceled the RFQ, saying the cloud market had matured and it needed to change the solicitation. The agency will put out a revised RFQ in the coming weeks.

Amazon spokeswoman Kay Kinton called Apptis a “good partner” and said “we expect to keep working with them,” but did not elaborate. She declined to talk about Amazon’s plans for the new RFQ, saying the company hasn’t seen it yet.

Amazon, like other tech companies eyeing the federal cloud market, has established an office in the Washington area. One key staffer there is C.J. Moses, a former FBI assistant section chief and former technical director at Mitre Corp., in McLean, Va., according to his LinkedIn profile. Moses has a background in computer security — a key concern of government agencies contemplating moving sensitive data to the cloud.

Despite its growing presence in the nation's capital, however, Amazon prefers to keep a low profile. The company declined to make Moses available for an interview or say how many people are working at its office in Herndon, Va., in the Washington, D.C. area. Amazon also has data centers in Northern Virginia.

Some agencies that have begun experimenting with Amazon’s cloud services are enthusiastic about the possibilities.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab has used Amazon Web Services on a variety of projects: processing images of Saturn and data from the Mars Rover, and doing computations to predict the location of spacecraft. The results can be dramatic, said Tom Soderstrom, the lab’s IT chief technology officer. In the case of the Saturn images, for example, Amazon Web Services brought the processing time down from 15 days to just five hours.

“We are getting our results faster,” Soderstrom said. “It allows our scientists to do more simulations and makes our missions safer.”

But the NASA lab’s experience with Amazon was not without bumps. The lab spent seven months negotiating with Amazon over things like whether government auditors could inspect Amazon’s computer servers and how billing would work.

The lab hasn’t used the Amazon cloud yet for sensitive data. It is testing an Amazon product called Virtual Private Cloud, which allows users to tap an “isolated” set of servers while maintaining their own firewall and other security protections. (The lab is also working with Google and Microsoft web services.)

Synteractive, a D.C.-based IT company that helped build Recovery.gov, the U.S. government’s website that tracks stimulus spending, used Amazon Web Services to test and develop the site last summer. Synteractive CEO Evan Burfield said Amazon made sense because of the “very tight turnaround time” for the project (10 weeks) which left little room for provisioning computers.

Synteractive was a subcontractor to Smartronix, of Hollywood, Md., on the Recovery.gov project. The two companies are teaming again on a bid for work on Treasury Department websites, including FinancialStability.gov and MakingHomeAffordable.gov. Burfield said if they win the bid, they’ll develop and run the sites on Amazon’s cloud.

If other agencies are dabbling with Amazon Web Services, there’s a chance Amazon itself might not know. If individual developers in a government office try one of the services, they might use their personal credit card, making it hard for the company to track if the service is being used in that agency.

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