United States Defense Department Asks Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle to Bid on the JWCC Program

DoD looking to entrust cloud security to multiple vendors.

Nov. 24, 2021, 1:26 a.m.

TL;DR

Defense Department of the United States allows cloud providers to bid for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program. The Department of Defense plans to give “Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity” contracts, otherwise known as IDIQ, to these cloud providers.

JWCC replaced JEDI and DoD decided not to offer the contract to Microsoft anymore

Key Facts

1
DoD allows other cloud providers to bid for a new effort developed.
2
The new effort known as JWCC was used to replace a former program known as JEDI.
3
JEDI, which is known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, was collected from Microsoft.
4
In this new program, the DoD plans to give IDIQ contracts to each cloud providers.

Details

On the 19th of November, 2021, the United States Defense Department made public their decision to let Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle submit bids for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program (JWCC), and the program could reach multiple billions of dollars as reported by the officials.

This new effort, JWCC, was used to replace a former contract, Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, that Microsoft won when they bid against Amazon in the final round in 2019. JEDI contract was meant for a single cloud provider and is meant to be worth about 10 billion dollars over 10 years. The JWCC program aims to source solutions from more than one cloud provider, unlike the JEDI, which is meant to use a single cloud provider for cloud solutions. JWCC replaced JEDI and DoD decided not to offer the contract to Microsoft anymore after market research was concluded a few weeks ago and made DoD realize a multiple cloud program would meet DoD’s needs compared to a single cloud program.

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.
The U.S General Services Administration (GSA)

An Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity, known as IDIQ for short, is a contract with an indefinite amount of services for a specific period. Each contract will have a 3-year base 2-years long option period.

The DoD plans to award the IDIQ contracts to only Amazon and Microsoft but later decided to give other Cloud Service Providers.

Oracle is delighted to be included in the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability RFP. We are committed to delivering the highest level of security, performance, and value in enterprise cloud applications and cloud infrastructure in support of DOD’s Warfighter mission.
Deborah Hellinger
Oracles' Spokesperson

Google also has shown interest in bidding in this program, particularly as they didn’t bid for the initially scrapped JEDI.

If we are invited to be part of the JWCC contract, we will absolutely bid. And 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 Chief Executive Officer