IBM Corp.’s cloud computing ambitions just got a big boost with the news today that it signed up Australia’s federal government as its latest marquee customer.

The five-year deal, said to be worth $740 million, ensures that Australian government agencies that don’t already work with IBM will now be able to buy its products and services without inking separate contracts first.

The Australian government, meanwhile, touted the “significant savings over the next five years” that it will realize from the deal. The agreement, said to be the largest-ever information technology contract for Australia’s federal government, will see IBM provide an extensive range of hardware, software and cloud-based products to government agencies.

All of Australia’s government departments will have access to IBM’s tech under the terms of the deal. However, for those that already have significant investments in IBM, including the Department of Human Services, the Australian Taxation Office, the Department of Home Affairs and the Department of Defence, the deal is said to improve on those arrangements and provide more “autonomy and flexibility.”

The deal also provides for “joint innovation programs” in areas such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cybersecurity and quantum computing. Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency will work alongside IBM on these projects, which are aimed at propelling it toward its goal of becoming one of the top three digital governments in the world by 2025.

The main idea is to “prioritize the introduction of new technologies to citizen services,” Australia’s government said.

One of the programs involves IBM setting up a research team in Melbourne that will be tasked with studying potential applications for AI, blockchain and quantum computing in government. Additional research units will be based in Canberra and on the Gold Coast, working on new cybersecurity tools for data protection. They’ll also be looking into how supercomputers can be used to enhance government services.

Constellation Research Inc. Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE he wasn’t surprised to see IBM land such a massive contract given its existing relationship and history with the Australian government, which spans more than 40 years. He said that IBM’s reliance on providing services, which is generally seen as hurting its share price in the stock market, actually gives it an advantage over its rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. and helps it to secure deals such as this one.

“The public sector knows that its complicated IT systems need a lot of hands to adapt them for 21st century technologies and platforms,” Mueller said. “IBM has an advantage over the competition, which needs to partner with third-party companies to achieve the same level of service.”

IBM’s contract award comes despite a couple of recent calamities relating to past services it provided for Australia’s government. They include failing to provide basic protection against a distributed denial-of-service attack that led to an outage during Australia’s online census in 2016, and a botched payroll system IBM installed for Queensland’s Department of Health for which the client was later blamed.

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