The Defense Department on Friday issued formal solicitations to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle for its highly-anticipated Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, the multibillion dollar project designed to replace its ill-fated JEDI Cloud contract.
The decision followed several months of market research, and represented a change from DoD’s initial plans for the contract. In July, when it cancelled the JEDI contract — short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure — officials said they believed that only AWS and Microsoft had the technical capabilities to meet their needs under JWCC.
“The DoD studied the commercial cloud market and assessed capability statements that were submitted by cloud service providers and any follow-up communications provided to the department,” Russ Goemaere, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement. “We assessed each CSP’s service and capability offerings as they related to the department’s unfulfilled warfighting needs, enduring capability gaps, high-level JWCC requirements, and each CSP’s ability to meet the JWCC capability delivery schedule. We also collaborated with DoD stakeholders from the Military Services, Combatant Commands, Principal Staff Assistants, Combat Support Agencies, Defense Agencies, and Field Activities to survey requirement owners about what they would want to see in an enterprise level cloud offering.”
John Sherman, DoD’s then-acting CIO said in July that he intended to engage in discussions with all five U.S.-based “hyperscale” cloud providers before the department made a final decision. It wasn’t immediately clear why IBM, the fifth provider DoD consulted, did not receive its own solicitation.
The decision to include Oracle was particularly noteworthy, as that firm had been a thorn in DoD’s side throughout much of the JEDI Cloud contracting process. Oracle filed numerous pre-award and post-award bid protests challenging its exclusion from JEDI, eventually taking the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case earlier this year.
Google said earlier this month that it would be interested in pursuing work under the JWCC contract, if DoD selected it for one of the directed solicitations.
“If selected as one of the compliant vendors, we will proudly work with the DoD to help them modernize their operations following the process we have in place for working with our customers, including the processes we’ve developed around our AI Principles,” Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO wrote in a Nov. 11 blog post. “When the JEDI RFP was issued, Google Cloud was not in a position to bid. First and foremost, our technologies were not ready to meet the various classification levels and other technical requirements necessary to compete.”
Friday’s solicitations are not contract awards — at least not yet. DoD still must negotiate separate indefinite-delivery/indefinite/quantity contracts with each company, a process the department has previously said it expected to finalize by April of 2022. Once the contracts are formally in place, the Pentagon expects to start using JWCC to deliver unclassified cloud services 30 days later, secret-level services after 60 days, and top-secret services after 180 days.
The actual solicitation documents DoD sent to companies on Friday were not made public, so it’s not yet clear how substantially the JWCC project will differ from the department’s initial vision from JEDI.
“At a high level, the JWCC requirements include providing capability and parity of service at all three classification levels, integrated cross domain solutions, global availability of tactical edge environments and enhanced cybersecurity controls,” Danielle Metz, DoD’s deputy chief information officer for information enterprise said in a statement.
This breaking news story will be updated