The Department of Defense (DoD) announced today it has delayed its schedule for its proposed multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) cloud contract and now aims to make contract awards in December – about eight months later than its initial goal of April.
DoD has completed its market research phase and invited four major cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle – to bid on the up to $9 billion JWCC contract in November.
As the agency has leaned into the process with four vendors, DoD CIO John Sherman said in a call with reporters today that DoD realized its schedule “was maybe a little too ahead of what we thought.” Sherman said the agency now hopes to “wrap up in the fall” in order to make awards in December.
“Everything is going very well, it’s just a matter of the scale of this,” Sherman told reporters. “As we lean into it and start doing all the back and forth with the vendors, having the questions answered, looking at the proposals, it’s just going to take us a little bit longer than we thought.”
“For my CIO seat, I’ve told the team we’re going to make sure we do this right,” he added. “Take the time that they need, so we can stick the landing on this, given the imperative of what JWCC is for the Department of Defense.”
Sherman noted the four vendors submitted their proposals to the DoD in late January. The Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) Hosting and Compute Center (HaCC) is now reviewing the proposals in support of the Washington Headquarters Services.
Although Sherman could not speak to any of the specific proposals, he did reiterate that a direct solicitation and the submission of a proposal “does not guarantee an award.”
The JWCC is a multi-cloud effort that will provide enterprise cloud capabilities for the DoD at all three security classifications – unclassified, secret, and top-secret – all the way from the continental United States out to the tactical edge, Sherman said, calling the effort an “unprecedented” procurement.
In July 2021, DoD announced plans to solicit bids for the JWCC contract after canceling its single-vendor $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud services contract that had been tied up in protests.
