The U.S. Defense Department said Tuesday that it plans to award as much as $9 billion in contracts for cloud infrastructure services in December, about eight months later than it expected.
The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC, initiative represents a new path for the U.S. military that would rely on multiple cloud providers, rather than a single one. That was the strategy the Pentagon had initially sought to use with the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract. The Pentagon wound up awarding the contract to Microsoft before canceling it.
“We’ve recognized that our schedule was maybe a little too ahead of what we thought, and that now we’re going to wrap up in the fall and we’re aiming to award in December,” John Sherman, the Pentagon’s chief information officer, said on a call with reporters. In July 2021, when it announced the JWCC, the goal had been to award contracts as soon as April 2022, Sherman said.
