The Pentagon has revealed the successor to the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract: the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract.
JEDI was canceled in July because Amazon complained it was only awarded to Microsoft because former President Donald Trump wanted to undermine Jeff Bezos. The legal battle that resulted from that complaint delayed work on the JEDI contract, so the Department of Defense announced that it would replace that initiative with the JWCC contract updated on Nov. 19.
One key difference between the JEDI and the JWCC contracts: JEDI was a winner-takes-all contract that would have tasked a single company with updating the Pentagon’s cloud infrastructure; JWCC is a multi-vendor contract that the DoD says it expects to award to both Amazon and Microsoft. (Presumably so it can avoid the delays that led to JEDI’s cancellation.)
The Pentagon says that it “will solicit and negotiate to award a contract to all all responsible vendors that are deemed capable of meeting the requirements set out in the attached ‘Required Capabilities’ document.” To that end, in addition to soliciting bids from Amazon and Microsoft, the DoD also solicited bids on the JWCC contract from both Google and Oracle.
According to the notice, each contract is “intended to be for a period of performance of one 36-month base period with two 12-month option periods.” So far as the value of those contracts goes, the Pentagon says it “is still evaluating the contract ceiling for this procurement, but anticipates that a multi-billion dollar ceiling will be required.” It will share more details later.
