The Defense Department announced that its potential ten-year, $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract, which was first awarded to Microsoft in Oct. 2019, has been canceled due to cloud advancement and the development of other initiatives, the Pentagon said in a statement on Tuesday.
“JEDI was developed at a time when the Department’s needs were different and both the CSPs technology and our cloud conversancy was less mature,” said John Sherman, acting chief information officer for the Department of Defense (DOD).
“In light of new initiatives like JADC2 and AI and Data Acceleration (ADA), the evolution of the cloud ecosystem within DoD, and changes in user requirements to leverage multiple cloud environments to execute mission, our landscape has advanced and a new way-ahead is warranted to achieve dominance in both traditional and non-traditional warfighting domains,” he added.
Following the decision to cancel the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract on Tuesday, the Pentagon also announced its intent to seek request for proposals (RFPs) from both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), for its new Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) multi-cloud and multi-vendor indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract.
The Pentagon said that AWS and Microsoft are the only two cloud service providers with the capabilities to meet DOD’s requirements for its up-to-date cloud computing efforts under the current administration. However, the department plans to continue its market research to determine other potential CSPs with the capabilities to meet DOD’s requirements.