WASHINGTON: The Defense Department will delay awarding contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, its enterprise cloud effort valued at up to $9 billion, to the end of this year, the Pentagon’s chief information officer said today.
The original timeline laid out included awarding contracts in April, and then in November, DoD issued formal solicitations to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle and Google.
“But as we’ve gotten into this and leaned into it with four vendors, we’ve recognized that our schedule was maybe a little too ahead of what we thought and that now we’re going to wrap up in the fall and we’re aiming to award in December,” John Sherman, DoD CIO, told reporters.
Despite the newly anticipated December time frame, Sherman said “everything is going very well” with JWCC. He added the Pentagon is doing “all the back and forth” with the vendors and evaluating proposals.
“It’s just going to take us a little bit longer than we thought and, from my CIO seat, 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 to what JWCC is for the Department of Defense,” he said.
Sherman added initial JWCC contracts will “be a three-year base with two one-year options and then at the conclusion of this, we’re going to be launching a full and open competition for a future multi-cloud acquisition.” The new timeline shifts the competition to early 2026 instead of 2025. Today was also the first time DoD unveiled the effort would have a potential ceiling value of $9 billion.
The Pentagon envisions JWCC as its enterprise multi-vendor, multi-cloud follow up to the infamous, failed single-source Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which was worth up to $10 billion. The contract was canceled in July last year after years of legal battles.
RELATED: DoD Kills JEDI, Pivots To Multi-Cloud
“Nothing in the department meets this requirement at the current time… and it will be imperative for capabilities like Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, as well as the AI and Data Accelerator, or ADA, initiative and other key warfighting activities for the combatant commands and indeed all across the enterprise,” Sherman said.
Although JWCC won’t be mandated for all the services, as its utility is proven out DoD will “expect more and more of the service needs to transition to JWCC,” he added.