Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon will share in the Pentagons $9 billion contract to build its cloud computing network, a year after accusations of politicization over the previously announced contract and a protracted legal battle resulted in the military starting over in its award process.
The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability is envisioned to provide access to unclassified, secret and top-secret data to military personnel all over the globe. It is anticipated to serve as a backbone for the Pentagons modern war operations, which will rely heavily on unmanned aircraft and space communications satellites, but will still need a way to quickly get the intelligence from those platforms to troops on the ground.
The contract will be awarded in parts, with a total estimated completion date of June 2028, the Pentagon said in a statement.
Competition is intense to snap up big corporate and government cloud contracts awards to build global computing networks where information is stored, shared and secured over the internet instead of on local computer systems. The Pentagons award is seen as one of the most coveted because its a stamp of approval in a market where ensuring a clients data security is important.
Its the most important cloud deal to come out of the Beltway, said analyst Daniel Ives, who monitors the cloud industry for Wedbush Securities. Its about the Pentagon as a reference customer. It says significant accolades about what they think about that vendor, and thats the best reference customer you could have in that world.
Last July, the Pentagon announced it was cancelling its previous cloud computing award, then named JEDI. At the time, the Pentagon said that due to delays in proceeding with the contract, technology had changed to the extent that the old contract, which was awarded to Microsoft, no longer met DODs needs.
It did not mention the legal challenges behind those delays, which had come from Amazon, the losing bidder. Amazon had questioned whether former President Donald Trumps administration had steered the contract toward Microsoft due to Trumps adversarial relationship with Amazons chief executive officer at the time, Jeff Bezos.
In July when the cancellation was announced, the Pentagons chief information officer, John Sherman, said it was likely both Amazon and Microsoft would get some portion of the business in a new award.
A report by the Pentagons inspector general did not find evidence of improper influence, but it said it could not determine the extent of administration interactions with Pentagon decision-makers because the White House would not allow unfettered access to witnesses.
Forrester analyst Devin Dickerson said awarding the contract to four companies instead of one shows a multicloud strategy that could improve the Pentagons bargaining position with major cloud providers and make it easier for individual offices within the Defense Department to acquire cloud technologies and services.
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