The U.S. Defense Department has completed the market research phase of its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, program, which aims to modernize the Pentagon’s information technology infrastructure.

The development was reported on Thursday by Federal News Network. Danielle Metz, the DOD’s deputy chief information officer for the information enterprise, disclosed during an event earlier this week that market research for JWCC is now complete. 

“Most times, something similar to this would have taken 10 months for market research,” Metz was quoted as saying. “The team did it in 60 days, and it’s because we are hearing the sense of urgency from our combatant commanders: We still have an urgent, unmet capability gap. We don’t have a contract where we can order cloud services and infrastructure at all three classification levels, and at the tactical edge.”

JWCC is part of a broad effort that the DOD launched several years ago to upgrade its technology capabilities using cloud services. JWCC was preceded by another, since-canceled procurement program dubbed JEDI, short for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. 

Under JEDI, the DOD would have spent up to $10 billion over ten years to procure cloud infrastructure and services from a single provider. The contract was awarded to Microsoft Corp. in 2019, even though cloud market leader Amazon Web Services Inc. was widely expected to be named as the winner. 

The surprise decision was followed by a lengthy legal battle. AWS charged that the move to award JEDI to Microsoft was influenced by political interference from former President Donald Trump and argued that Microsoft’s winning bid should be disqualified. Oracle Corp., which had also made a bid for JEDI, filed its own lawsuit over the contract. 

In July, the DOD announced that it has decided to scrap JEDI and replace it with JWCC. One of the most important differences between the two programs is that JWCC has a multicloud focus: The DOD will not award the contract to a single provider but rather use multiple cloud platforms.

Now that the market research phase of JWCC is complete, the DOD is expected to submit “directed solicitations” to at least two public cloud providers, namely AWS and Microsoft. Contract awards are reportedly set to be announced by next April. Once the agreements are signed, the cloud infrastructure and services that will be delivered through JWCC are set to be rolled out in phases. 

According to Federal News Network, DOD is looking to make cloud services available for running unclassified workloads within 30 days of the contracts being signed. Services approved for use at the secret and top secret classification levels will follow suit within 60 and 180 days, respectively. 

In a second development related to JWCC, the Supreme Court this week declined to hear a lawsuit from Oracle over the DOD’s cloud procurement effort. Oracle’s lawsuit originally focused on the JEDI program. In its petition to the Supreme Court, the company argued that potential concerns still remain now that the DOD has replaced JEDI with JWCC. 

“Cases do not become moot simply because a defendant issues a press release claiming to have ceased its misconduct,” Oracle’s lawyers wrote in the petition. “This court should hold Oracle’s petition until the Department of Defense screens bidders under the JWCC solicitation, or at least clarifies its parameters.”

When JWCC was announced earlier this year, DOD officials indicated that cloud providers other than AWS and Microsoft could potentially be considered for the program as well. That’s potentially good news for Oracle. Additionally, the program’s multicloud structure could potentially enable IBM Corp. and Google LLC to participate as well. 

Photo: gregwest98/Flickr