The Defense Department’s sequel to the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract it awarded in 2022 will target more than the four major hyperscale cloud service providers — Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle — that won the first contract back in 2022.
Speaking Thursday at the ATO and Cloud Security Summit, Defense Department Chief Information Officer Katie Arrington said JWCC Next will “open the door” to smaller cloud service providers and non-traditional companies “that generally wouldn’t be involved in the [DOD] and our world and trying to bring them in and figure out ways we can incorporate them.”
“We are looking to expand the aperture,” Arrington said. “Competition breeds innovation, competition breeds efficiency.”
The Defense Department and its components currently purchase a wide variety of cloud services through the JWCC contract. Several months ago, the department began developing requirements for JWCC Next, which would share similarities with the current contract “but at a bigger scale.” Arrington said she’ll be looking for nontraditional companies that bring “innovative AI tools,” unique capabilities around satellites and “new ways to develop weaponry” and business systems.
“If there’s a better, faster way to develop weaponry, absolutely all day,” she said. “And then, of course, business systems. Everything flows into business systems, so everything is on the table right now.”
Arrington said she couldn’t commit to a timeline for when the department will release a draft request for proposals to industry, but said she assumes it will be “very, very soon.”
JWCC is just one of several multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts across the Defense Department and intelligence community. In 2020, the CIA awarded its multibillion-dollar C2E cloud contract to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM, enabling them to compete for specific IC task orders. Amazon Web Services also won the NSA’s $10 billion cloud contract internally dubbed WildandStormy.
JWCC was itself a sequel of sorts to the canceled Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, an attempted single-award contract the Pentagon scrapped after years of litigation and controversy.
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