Pentagon’s JEDI Contract Successor, JWCC, Delayed Until December

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has pushed back, yet again, its much delayed cloud contract until the end of the year.

Reuters reported that the Pentagon had intended to award its massive Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract in April. But now the Pentagon’s chief information officer told reporters this is now delayed until December.

The Pentagon last November had solicited bids from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle for the cloud contract, that could be valued as much as $9 billion.

JWCC contract

Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman told reporters that the proposals from the four cloud service providers are currently being evaluated.

“This is going to take us a little bit longer than we thought,” Sherman was quoted as saying, before adding that the workload to evaluate multiple proposals simultaneously was cumbersome.

Up to four winners could be selected with the combined value of the contracts coming to as much as $9 billion over five years if all options and extensions were exercised, Sherman reportedly said.

The JWCC is the multi-cloud successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which was an IT modernisation project to build a large, common commercial cloud for the US Department of Defense.

The Pentagon’s Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) programme is a multi billion dollar project (although the actual value is not yet confirmed).

It has been described by the DoD as an attempt to “achieve dominance in both traditional and non-traditional warfighting domains.”

JEDI Successor

The JWCC succeeded the JEDI contract, which had been hit with years of trouble and legal challenges.

Trouble began after the Pentagon in October 2019 decided to award the JEDI contract exclusively to Microsoft, despite Amazon’s AWS cloud division being widely regarded as favourite to win the contract.

Amazon challenged the Pentagon’s decision to award Microsoft the entire JEDI contract, blaming political pressure from former US President Donald Trump.

In November 2019 AWS filed an official complaint with the US Court of Federal Claims contesting the decision.

In September 2020 the Pentagon concluded that Microsoft had been the best value for money for the contract, much to the anger of AWS.

And AWS continued its challenge until July 2021, when the Pentagon shelved the JEDI contract altogether.