The Pentagon announced Wednesday that it has executed on $969 million in task orders on its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) cloud services contract vehicle and currently has 75 packages in the process for award.
JWCC is the Pentagon’s high-priority enterprise cloud effort that replaced the Defense Department’s (DoD) aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure initiative. Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft were all awarded spots on the $9 billion JWCC program in December 2022 and are competing for task orders.
The initiative is a key element of the department’s push for digital modernization. It’s also considered critical to enabling the department’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) warfighting concept, which aims to better connect the platforms, sensors, and data streams of the U.S. military and key international allies and partners under a more unified network to enable better and faster decision-making and more effective and efficient operations.
“DoD stood up the JWCC, a multiple-award contract vehicle to provide DoD the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers,” the Pentagon wrote in an innovation fact sheet released on Aug. 7 “DoD has executed over $969 million on JWCC and has 75 other packages in the process for award.”
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the release of the DoD’s new innovation fact sheet in her keynote address at the 2024 Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference in D.C.
In late June, Les Benito, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Hosting and Compute Center’s chief of product development and management, told reporters that the JWCC contract is rapidly gaining momentum, with anticipation of additional task orders in the pipeline.
The Pentagon has doled out 63 task orders “with a lifetime value of almost $800 million,” Benito said at AFCEA International’s TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore.
That means, in just five weeks, the JWCC task order total has climbed by another $169 million.
“[JWCC] is picking up steam as we expected … as we’ve gone through it, and there’s more in the pipeline,” Benito said.
