The Pentagon’s JEDI cloud computing contract has hit another speed bump.

Defense Department officials said today that the announcement of the winning bid will be deferred until newly appointed Defense Secretary Mark Esper completes a review of the project. Dana Deasy, the DOD’s chief information officer, said the evaluation is expected to take several weeks.

Deasy avoided providing a specific time frame but told reporters that the winner likely won’t be named before month’s end. As recently as late June, Defense Department officials anticipated that the JEDI bidding process would wrap up in late August.

“We’ve got to get this right, so we are not going to rush to a decision,” Deasy said today. “We are going to spend whatever time the evaluation team needs to spend to make sure we are picking the best technical solution at the right price with the right criteria.”

The JEDI program, for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, will see the Pentagon spend up to $10 billion on cloud services over the next 10 years. The contract specifications calls for the entire deal to be awarded to a single provider. There are only two bidders left in the race: Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the biggest and second-biggest players in the infrastructure-as-a-service market, respectively.

However, AWS is still the frontrunner and is widely expected to get the deal. And Deasy told a gathering of reporters this morning that there are still no plans to split the contract to go to more than the one supplier specified in the contract. Pentagon officials also handed out a JEDI project fact sheet and a requirements guide at the press briefing to try to dispel what it called “myths and misinformation” about JEDI.

The announcement of the delay comes days after Defense Secretary Esper hit pause on JEDI to allow for an assessment of its details. Earlier, President Donald Trump said he had decided to take a look at the contract in response to complaints from AWS competitors. The cloud giant, which is seen as the favorite to win the lucrative deal, has been accused of having an unfair advantage in the bidding process.

The matter ended up going all the way to court. Oracle Corp. filed a lawsuit last year charging that conflicts of interest at the DOD tipped the scales in AWS’ favor, but a court dismissed the case in July after an investigation turned up no evidence of organizational bias.

There may be a chance Oracle’s complaint will lead to further complications for JEDI. Before the court rejected its suit, sources told the Federal News Network that the company would be likely to take the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the event of a dismissal.

But the Pentagon may award JEDI before that comes to fruition. Secretary Esper’s review of the contract is “separate” from the winner selection, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported that Pentagon officials are pushing ahead with the technical aspects of the process.

That may suggest a certain optimism on officials’ part about the time frame of the winner selection. It also reflects the sense of urgency building around the program more than 12 months after bidding opened. Air Force Lt. Gen. John Shanahan, who heads the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said today during the press briefing about the JEDI delay “we don’t want to waste any time.… We know our potential adversaries are doing it at their own speed.”

The officials also called out artificial intelligence as a key driver for a quick resolution. Lt. General Jack Shanahan, who heads up AI for the DOD, said that without an enterprise cloud, “there is no AI at scale,” and AI is critical for warfighting.

Without AI at scale, he said, “AI will remain a series of small-scale stovepipe projects with little to no means to make AI available or useful to warfighters.” JEDI, he added, “will provide on-demand, elastic compute at scale, data at scale, substantial network and transport advantages, DevOps and a secure operating environment.”

But he also said it’s about more than AI. “It is also about joint all-domain warfighting, taking advantage of emerging technologies to develop new operating concepts for a kind of warfare that will look completely different than what we’ve experienced for the past 20 years.”

The need for a fast rollout is one of the main explanations the Pentagon has provided for its decision to award JEDI to a single provider instead of multiple companies. Nevertheless, this aspect of the contract remains controversial in some quarters. The winner-takes-all structure of JEDI has come under fire from Oracle, fellow AWS rival IBM Corp. and even members of Congress, though those members aren’t on the key Senate Armed Services Committee that has oversight of military deals. 

Photo: David B. Gleason