Pentagon announces new cloud initiative to replace ill-fated JEDI contract – By Ron Miller (Techcrunch) / Nov 19 2021
The Pentagon announced a limited request for bids for a new cloud initiative today that replaces the cancelled $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract initiative. You may recall (or not) that it previously ran a winner-take-all bid it had dubbed JEDI (short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure). The new initiative goes by the much less catchy name, Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC for short.
Under the terms of the RFP, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle have been invited to bid. That multi-vendor approach is markedly different from the JEDI RFP, where just a single vendor was going to walk away with the prize. In fact, the Pentagon makes clear that while it favors Amazon and Microsoft, any of the qualified (invited) vendors could get a piece of this deal.
As the RFP states, “The Government anticipates awarding two IDIQ contracts — one to Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and one to Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) — but intends to award to all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that demonstrate the capability to meet DoD’s requirements.”
