Pentagon delays awarding JWCC contract until December

The Pentagon has announced its decision to shelve a contract for Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) until December.

Per reports, JWCC, worth up to $9 billion, was originally scheduled for April 2022. The multi-cloud contract supersedes the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), intended for building a common commercial cloud for the US Department of Defense (DoD).

As presented in JEDI, the Trump administration sought a single cloud-computing provider for the DoD. However, the Biden administration decided to distribute the project between multiple vendors.

The JEDI contract with Microsoft was officially canceled on July 6, 2021, making way for JWCC.

Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are among the firms the DoD is contemplating for JWCC, as confirmed by Pentagon chief information officer John Sherman.

"This is going to take us a little bit longer than we thought," Sherman said in a statement, adding that the workload to evaluate multiple proposals simultaneously can be challenging.

As many as four winners could be chosen, with the combined contracts valued at about $9 billion over five years if all options and extensions are exercised.

“Such a move would put the military more in line with private-sector companies, many of whom split up their cloud computing work among multiple vendors to avoid being locked in to any specific one,” reported Reuters.