The Department of Defense (DoD) revealed it now plans to make awards for a major cloud contract eight months later than planned, stating it is taking longer than expected to review proposals from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft and Oracle.
The contract in question is the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) procurement, which was announced in July of last year as a replacement for the scrapped Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. At the time, DoD officials said they hoped to make awards for JWCC in April 2022. A solicitation for bids was subsequently issued in November of last year to the four aforementioned vendors.
But speaking on a call with reporters on Tuesday, DoD CIO John Sherman said it now expects to wrap up its review of JWCC bids this fall and is “aiming to award in December.” He added dialogue between the agency and the vendors is “very robust” but noted the process of conducting due diligence with four companies was taking longer than it originally projected.
“Everything is going very well, it’s just a matter of the scale of this,” he explained. “I’ve told the team we’re going to make sure we do this right, 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 reiterated JWCC will be a multi-cloud effort which will provide enterprise cloud capabilities for the DoD across all three of its security classifications (unclassified, secret and top secret) both within the U.S. and at the “tactical edge”. In addition to supporting warfighting efforts, the contracted cloud capabilities will enable better logistics and healthcare, software development and artificial intelligence, he said. It will carry an initial three-year term with two one-year renewal options.
Once the JWCC term is up, Sherman said DoD plans to launch a “full and open competition for a future multi-cloud acquisition.”