The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) plans to launch “JWCC Next,” – a follow-on to the Department of Defense’s (DoD) $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract – in the second quarter of fiscal year (FY) 2026, a senior Pentagon tech official said on Aug. 7.
“The plan is to get [JWCC Next] on the street in the second quarter of FY 2026 with an award [anticipated] in early FY 2027,” John Hale, DISA’s chief of product management and development, said during Defense One’s DoD Cloud Workshop.
JWCC Next is currently in the acquisition strategy phase. DISA completed the contract’s requirements document earlier this year and is coordinating closely with it’s the agency’s chief acquisition executive and the Pentagon’s Acquisition and Sustainment Office (A&S) to finalize the strategy.
JWCC Next is being developed to expand beyond the four hyperscale cloud providers currently included in the initial JWCC contract — Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle — with the goal of offering access to a broader set of commercial cloud service providers.
Established in 2022 to streamline DoD’s access to commercial cloud services, JWCC has since generated more than $3 billion in task orders.
“[JWCC] to date [has] been very successful, and it’s worked out very well … [but] we started to realize that other cloud brokers in the department were leveraging capabilities we didn’t necessarily make available on the JWCC contract,” Hale said, adding that “a big one was access to third-party marketplaces and vendors.”
According to Hale, JWCC Next aims to improve flexibility and increase the availability of third-party cloud capabilities across the DoD enterprise. However, while the original JWCC contract was awarded to four providers, it remains unclear how many vendors will be included in JWCC Next.
Hale also confirmed that the new contract is intended to replace the existing JWCC, with some overlap planned to support a smooth transition.
“One of the things we’re doing with JWCC Next is looking at how we can make it a longer contract term,” Hale said. “So, we don’t have that transition every five years.”