The Defense Department said late today that it has awarded Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) cloud contracts to the four bidders that have been in the mix for sizable chunks of the contract since the beginning of the process – Amazon Web Services, Google Support Services, Microsoft, and Oracle.
DoD did not state the total value of the JWCC contracts it announced today, not their individual dollar values, but has previously put the contract total at $9 billion.
Today’s announcement of the contract award tracks with comments from DoD CIO John Sherman last month when he said he expected news on the contract awards in December.
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.
Early on in the process, DoD had invited all four cloud providers to submit bids on the JWCC.
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.
In its contract award announcement today, DoD said that “JWCC is a multiple-award contract vehicle that will provide the DoD the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) at the speed of mission, at all classification levels, from headquarters to the tactical edge.”
“This Indefinite-Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) contract vehicle offers commercial pricing, or better, and streamlined provisioning of cloud services,” the agency said.
It said that the contract will deliver to DoD and the service branches the opportunity “to acquire the following capabilities under one contract:
- global accessibility
- available and resilient services
- centralized management and distributed control
- ease of use
- commercial parity
- elastic computing, storage, and network infrastructure
- advanced data analytics
- fortified security
- tactical edge devices.”
