The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) opened the door for Google and Oracle to bid on a multi-billion-dollar cloud contract alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, after conducting a market review which determined all four are capable of meeting its requirements.
The companies will be vying for the DoD’s Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, which was announced in July as a replacement for the agency’s scrapped Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) award. DoD initially named Amazon and Microsoft as the only qualified bidders but said it would undertake an assessment to see whether any other U.S.-based companies could meet its standards.
That review is now complete, DoD spokesperson Russell Goemaere told Fierce.
“We assessed each Cloud Service Provider’s (CSP’s) ability to meet the JWCC high-level requirements and projected capability delivery schedule, as outlined in the Pre-Solicitation Notice,” Goemaere stated. “We had open dialogue with U.S.-based hyperscale CSPs and gave fair opportunity to the CSPs to submit their capability statements as they relate to the JWCC high-level requirements. We are confident that our market research was exhaustive and resulted in a fair and reasonable final determination.”
DoD Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Information Enterprise Danielle Metz explained in a separate statement the JWCC requires CSPs to provide “capability and parity of service at all three classification levels, integrated cross domain solutions, global availability of tactical edge environments and enhanced cybersecurity controls.”
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Securing the ability to bid is a major win for both Google and Oracle. The former last week issued a public plea asking the DoD to give it a chance, arguing its capabilities have advanced significantly since the JEDI procurement. The latter, meanwhile, recently lost a bid to have the Supreme Court hear a legal case it filed challenging the JEDI award process.
Goemaere said the DoD is aiming to make awards for the JWCC contract in Q3 of the government’s fiscal 2022. He stressed, though, that “just because a particular CSP receives a solicitation does not mean it will receive an award.”
The DoD’s solicitation notice can be found here.