Dana Deasy, chief information officer at the Department of Defense (DoD), said today at the Defense Systems Summit that he would not commit to an official release date for the finalized request for proposal (RFP) for DoD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract.
“I would say we’re not a long way off,” said Deasy, who also was named DoD’s cloud leader on June 25. “We have a bit more work to do before it will be released. But what I’m not going to do is commit to a specific date today.”
The final RFP is now more than a month behind schedule, with DoD missing the May deadline it had initially set for itself. DoD chief spokesperson Dana White said on May 31 that there was “no timeline” for the release, a point reiterated by Deasy today.
“We are conducting a full, top-down, bottom-up review of this effort,” Deasy said, adding that JEDI “seems to be the topic of the hour.”
There’s a clear reason for the delay, Deasy said, with a potential 10-year, $10 billion contract award hanging in the balance. He said DoD is committed to doing its due diligence to ensure clarity and generate the broadest volume of responses. These comments come in light of pressure from industry for an open competition and calls for DoD to justify why the contract will be a single award.
“This is not about making a certain date to get the RFP out,” Deasy said. “This is about making sure when we do release the RFP, it’s truly comprehensive, it is clear, and it’s written in a way that will maximize responses. And frankly, it is written in a way that truly represents what any smart, intelligent company in private industry would do when seeking to put an enterprise cloud in place.”
DoD released its second draft RFP on April 16 and gave industry and other stakeholders two weeks to pose additional comments to aid in drafting the forthcoming final version. The first draft RFP received more than 1,000 comments.
