The Pentagon has pushed back the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract award to December, adding to the saga of its cloud transition.
The Pentagon initially awarded the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft, surprising industry experts who saw AWS as the front-runner. AWS immediately sued and tied up the contract award in court so long that the Pentagon finally canceled it and started over, replacing JEDI with JWCC.
According to Reuters, the process to award a new contract is taking longer than expected, with the time-frame for an award pushed back to December, instead of April.
“This is going to take us a little bit longer than we thought,” Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman said.
The same major players are being considered, including Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, and Google. Unlike JEDI, which was awarded to a single company, JWCC will likely be awarded to multiple companies, possibly all four. With a total of roughly $9 billion on the line, even a four-way split would still be a substantial contract for the cloud providers.
