Department Of Defense Delays Cloud Computing Contract: What You Need To Know

The Department of Defense has reportedly delayed the joint cloud computing contract decision. 

What Happened: According to a Reuters report, citing Pentagon chief information officer John Sherman, the Pentagon delayed its decision to award the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract from April to December. 

The JWCC contract could be worth as much as $9 billion over five years. The Pentagon has been reviewing bids from Amazon.com Inc AMZN, Alphabet Inc GOOG, Microsoft Corp MSFT and Oracle Corp ORCL.

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All of the companies could be selected as the JWCC allows for up to four joint contracts, much different than the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) put in place by the Trump administration. The JEDI was canceled by the Biden administration last year in favor of the JWCC.

Amazon was seen as the front-runner for the JEDI contract, but it ended up being awarded to Microsoft. However, after several complaints about the single-vendor approach and legal battles waged between those jockeying for the contract, the Pentagon cut the cord on the contract altogether, opting for a new multi-vendor approach. 

As it turns out, the workload of evaluating multiple proposals simultaneously is more difficult than focusing on individual proposals.

"This is going to take us a little bit longer than we thought," Sherman reportedly told reporters.

Photo: 12019 from Pixabay.