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The Pentagon divides the cloud contract that follows JEDI between Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon and Google

The United States Department of Defense has decided split the cloud contract that succeeds the JEDIannulled after a strong controversy over its concession, among the main US cloud providers: Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle. With this step, there are many who wonder if the Biden Administration does not seek to avoid the controversy of the JEDI Pentagon concession, which the Trump Administration granted to Microsoft, and which was withdrawn last year after the process that followed a Amazon’s formal protest and appeal for it.

According to the Pentagon, “The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-level cloud services that are available globally, across all security domains and classification levels, from strategic to tactical at the edge.«. The department adds about the JWCC, as the contract has been called, that “the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability will allow mission owners to have licensed commercial cloud offerings directly from their chosen Cloud Service Providers«.

As we have mentioned, the JWCC contract is the successor to JEDI, and has a financial endowment of 9,000 million dollars. This time, instead of awarding it to a single vendor, as happened with JEDI, the Defense Department has decided to split the contract among multiple vendors, a move that is becoming quite common with these types of contracts.

According to the document of each concession, the contract has been classified as hybrid, and has a combined investment ceiling of $9 billion among the four cloud providers to which it has been assigned. The funds will be assigned to each of them based on the particular and specific requests made by the agency.

This means that none of the four vendors will receive funding solely for receiving the grant, but will only receive funding based on the work they are commissioned to do, and when requested. The contract is scheduled to end on June 8, 2028.

Photo: David B. Gleason

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