The Department of Defense (DoD) remains on track to award its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract by December, DoD CIO John Sherman said during the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Forecast to Industry 2022 event on Nov. 7.
Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are contenders for the multi-cloud, multi-vendor contract.
After completing its market research phase on the contract, DoD invited the four cloud service providers to submit bids on the JWCC in November 2021. While all four companies received a solicitation to submit their bids for the JWCC, that does not guarantee them the contract award.
“The government anticipates awarding two [indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity] contracts—one to Amazon Web Services, Inc. and one to Microsoft Corporation – but intends to award to all cloud service providers that demonstrate the capability to meet DoD’s requirements,” the Pentagon wrote in a pre-solicitation notice posted to Sam.gov.
The DoD originally planned to make award contracts in April of this year, but in late March announced it would delay its contracting schedule to December. According to Sherman, the delay was the result of the DoD doing the due diligence on the four proposals it received. The agency realized the contracting schedule was “a little too ahead,” he said.
The Pentagon first announced its multi-vendor cloud contract plan in July 2021, after previous failed attempts to develop a single-vendor $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud services contract.
The Pentagon introduced the JEDI contract back in 2017 in an effort to develop enterprise-wide cloud capabilities for the military. Microsoft was officially awarded the JEDI contract twice, but work on the contract was held up by lawsuits and complaints from other commercial cloud providers about the contracting process. The DoD officially announced the cancellation of the JEDI contract in 2021.
