Pentagon awards nearly $1B in JWCC task orders
The Department of Defense has to date awarded just under $1 billion in task orders to vendors for its enterprise cloud initiative known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), according to the Pentagon.
The program is a key element of the DOD’s push for digital modernization. It’s also considered critical to enabling the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) warfighting concept, which aims to better connect the data streams of the U.S. military and key international allies and partners under a more unified network to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of operations.
JWCC replaced the aborted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) initiative. In December 2022, Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were awarded contract spots on the $9 billion JWCC program and are competing for task orders.
The contract vehicle provides the department “the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers,” defense officials noted in an innovation fact sheet distributed on Wednesday.
To date, the Pentagon has executed more than $969 million on JWCC and “has 75 other packages in the process for award,” per the fact sheet.
That dollar value is about 50 percent higher than it was just a few months ago. In May at the DefenseTalks conference presented by DefenseScoop, David McKeown, DOD’s deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity and senior information security officer, said the department had given 84 task orders at that point, totaling $628 million.
The fact sheet released Wednesday didn’t provide a breakdown of how many task orders each of the vendors has won.
Pentagon officials have been encouraging DOD components to embrace the contract vehicle.
“We had a memo put out that said all of the services [and] agencies need to rationalize their contracts for consuming cloud and move to JWCC at first opportunity,” McKeown noted.
Jeff Marshall, acting director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Hosting and Compute Center, said earlier this week that the initiative is “doing well.”
“It’s a contract vehicle that basically allows mission partners to come to us and be able to get into the cloud without having to do a lot of their own heavy lift to get that set up,” he said during an event Tuesday hosted by Defense One.
“The JWCC allows them to basically get that acquisition vehicle fairly quickly, and then they have something in their hands to work with,” Marshall added. “When I came in, what I saw is that is the push that DISA and DOD was taking everyone into the direction of. And it makes sense. It’s a cloud-first mentality. It definitely is where we should go for elasticity, for scalability and for metering systems, so that people can basically get their workloads and get them where they need them and do them correctly in a cloud environment without having to deal with the infrastructure and those costs and the things that are not part of their core.”
However, DISA is also looking to retool its Stratus cloud offering so that mission partners have better options when it makes more sense for them to use a private cloud instead of a public cloud, he noted.
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials are looking ahead to the next phase of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program, dubbed JWCC 2.0.
Before retiring recently, then DOD Chief Information Officer John Sherman directed the CIO’s team to conduct a review of the entire effort.
“While I’m a huge fan of it, I know it’s not perfect. Because … we’re kind of figuring out how to walk and chew gum in a multi-vendor environment,” Sherman said during an exit interview in June with DefenseScoop. “What can we do better for JWCC 2.0? Are there things we can put into place to make [software-as-a-service] offerings easier to manage?”
