The JEDI contract will be replaced with the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract
The US Department of Defense cancels the JEDI cloud computing contract awarded to Microsoft in 2019. (Credit: Touch Of Light/Wikipedia.org)
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has scrapped the $10bn joint enterprise defence infrastructure (JEDI) cloud computing contract awarded to Microsoft by the Trump Administration in 2019.
The Pentagon, which is the headquarters of DoD, said that the JEDI cloud contract no longer addresses its requirements. The department said that the cancellation has been done because of evolving needs, increased cloud conversancy, and advances in the industry.
According to the department, it has unmet cloud capability gaps to be filled for enterprise-wide, commercial cloud services at all three classification levels working at the tactical edge, at scale.
The department added that its cloud computing needs have advanced in recent years owing to Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration (ADA) and other initiatives.
The Pentagon, concurrent with the termination of the JEDI request for proposals (RFP), has announced its intent for new cloud efforts.
As per the department, the replacement of JEDI, which is Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), will be a multi-cloud/multi-vendor indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract.
The Pentagon plans to get proposals from a limited number of sources such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the JWCC contract. The department said that the two firms are the only cloud service providers (CSPs) which can address its requirements, as per available market research.
However, the department will engage with the industry immediately and continue its market research to understand if any other hyperscale CSPs based in the US can also meet its requirements.
DoD acting chief information officer John Sherman said: “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.
“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.”
The JEDI contract awarded to Microsoft was put on hold following a lawsuit filed by Amazon. The latter had alleged that the then US President Donald Trump had pressurised military officials against awarding the contract to it.