Pentagon Now Eyes December For $9B Cloud Contract

The department could end up awarding all four competing cloud vendors the combined value of the contracts, which could last over five years.

The U.S. Department of Defense will reportedly reward its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract worth upwards of $9 billion in December, pushing the date back from April.

A Pentagon spokesman told reporters on Tuesday that the agency needs more time to evaluate proposals from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, according to Reuters.

The department could end up awarding all four cloud vendors the combined value of the contracts, which could last over five years, according to Reuters.

CRN has reached out to the competing cloud vendors and the Pentagon for comment.

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The DoD announced JWCC as a multi-cloud version of the prior Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project.

JEDI became bogged down in politics and legal woes over the summer.

The original JEDI contract — potentially worth up to $10 billion — won by Microsoft in October 2019 was shelved in July “due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI cloud contract no longer meets its needs,” the Pentagon said in a statement at the time.

AWS filed a lawsuit following the contract award. The company alleged that the Pentagon erred in its technical evaluation of cloud providers’ bids for the contract, and that the White House under the Trump administration — including former President Donald Trump himself — had undue political influence on the bid selection process.