Google urged the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to allow it to join Amazon and Microsoft in bidding on a multi-billion-dollar cloud contract set to replace the agency’s recently scrapped Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) award, arguing its capabilities have advanced significantly in recent years.
The DoD originally began looking at cloud players in 2017 and eventually solicited vendors for the $10 billion JEDI contract in 2018. It handed Microsoft the win in 2019, but pulled the plug on the project this past July after years of legal wrangling over the award. At that time, it announced JEDI would be replaced by a new Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract and named Microsoft and Amazon as the only qualified bidders. It added, however, that it would conduct market research to assess whether any other U.S.-based companies could meet its requirements.
In a blog, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian argued “the Department should solicit assistance from numerous vendors, including Google Cloud,” stating this approach would help preserve choice and cut costs. “If we are invited to be part of the JWCC contract, we will absolutely bid,” he wrote.
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He acknowledged that “Google Cloud was not in a position to bid” when the procurement process for the JEDI contract began since its “technologies were not ready to meet the various classification levels and other technical requirements necessary to compete.” But since that time, he noted the company has “matured our services to meet a number of government classification levels.”
Kurian also pointed out the JWCC is designed to be a multi-cloud, multi-vendor award anyway. He insisted that means there “will be many areas where our product capabilities and engineering expertise can be brought to bear.”
A pre-solicitation notice for the JWCC was issued in July. It is unclear when the formal request for proposals will be published, but Kurian indicated it will be “soon.”