The Defense Department (DoD) said today it has invited four major cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle – to bid on its proposed multi-vendor Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract.
In July, 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.
The Pentagon said in July that it planned to issue solicitations to at least two companies – Microsoft and Amazon – both of whom were competitors on the JEDI deal. But DoD officials also said they were open to the possibility of including the three other largest players in the U.S. commercial cloud market; Google, IBM, and Oracle.
In an amended filing today on SAM.gov, DoD said it issued JWCC solicitations to AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. The amended filing contained no other changes to the existing contract description.
Last month, Danielle Metz, deputy DoD CIO for information enterprise, said DoD has completed its market research work on the contract, and would soon invite companies to participate. She affirmed that DoD hopes to make contract awards by April 2022.
Earlier this week, Google announced that it wanted an opportunity to bid on the JWCC deal. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said his company was not in a position to bid on the JEDI contract, but that it was now positioned to compete for the JWCC contract because it is structured as a multi-vendor award.
“Our commitment to supporting our nation’s military and ensuring that our warfighters and defense partners have access to the best technology for the best value is stronger than ever,” an AWS spokesperson said after DoD announced the four solicitations to cloud vendors for the JWCC contract. “We look forward to continuing to support the DoD’s modernization efforts and building solutions that help accomplish their critical missions.”
