Pentagon delays cloud computing contract to December -official

By Mike Stone

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Pentagon delayed its decision to award an enterprise-wide Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract that could be valued as much as $9 billion to December from April, the Pentagon’s chief information officer said on Tuesday.

Proposals are being evaluated from four companies: Alphabet’s Google, Oracle Corp, Microsoft Corp and Amazon Web Services, Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman told reporters.     

"This is going to take us a little bit longer than we thought," Sherman said, adding that the workload to evaluate multiple proposals simultaneously was cumbersome.

Up to four winners could be selected with the combined value of the contracts coming to as much as $9 billion over five years if all options and extensions were exercised, Sherman said.

The JWCC is the multi-cloud successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which was an IT modernization project to build a large, common commercial cloud for the Department of Defense.

While the Trump administration wanted a single cloud-computing provider for the Department of Defense as laid out under JEDI, the Biden administration canceled it in favor of parceling out the project to multiple companies.

Such a move would put the military more in line with private-sector companies, many of whom split up their cloud computing work among multiple vendors to avoid being locked in to any specific one.

(Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington, Editing by Franklin Paul and Bernard Orr)