The US Defense Department won’t decide until December—eight months later than expected—who will secure up to $9 billion in contracts for cloud infrastructure services.
The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) initiative represents what CNBC called a “new path” for the US military, allowing them to rely on multiple cloud providers, rather than just one.
“We’ve recognized that our schedule was maybe a little too ahead of what we thought,” Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman said. The original goal was to award contracts as soon as April 2022; “now we’re going to wrap up in the fall and we’re aiming to award in December,” Sherman confirmed.
The JWCC is the multi-cloud successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which was canceled in July due to allegations from Amazon that the contract was awarded to Microsoft because former President Donald Trump wanted to undermine Jeff Bezos.
One key difference between the two contracts is that JEDI was a winner-takes-all contract that would have tasked a single company with updating the Pentagon’s cloud infrastructure, while JWCC’s multi-vendor option allows the DoD to choose more than one company.
Proposals from four companies—Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle—are being evaluated. Up to four winners could be selected for three- to five-year contracts according to Reuters.
An about-face from the Trump administration, which wanted a single cloud-computing provider for the Department of Defense, President Biden called for multiple companies to each have a hand in building the DoD’s common commercial cloud project.
Work on JWCC could reach across all three security classifications—Official, Secret, Top Secret—and operate inside and outside the US.
