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Reducing corners: Earlier this 12 months, america Division of Protection (DoD) canceled the JEDI contract, which had been awarded to Microsoft greater than two years in the past and was price round $10 billion over ten years. The cancellation was resulting from a number of components starting from evolving technical necessities to a seemingly limitless cycle of award protests by Microsoft’s opponents. The division shortly adopted the cancellation with an up to date multi-vendor initiative designed to satisfy their technical wants whereas increasing the pool of potential cloud suppliers.
A brand new multibillion greenback solicitation for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Functionality (JWCC) was formally despatched to a number of main cloud suppliers on Friday. The solicitation was despatched to AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle following DoD’s earlier assessments of a number of cloud service suppliers and their technical potential to satisfy the brand new procurement’s necessities.
The JWCC contract is geared toward offering cloud companies much like these within the earlier JEDI contract in addition to new capabilities recognized because the award’s cancelation. The brand new program additionally intends to cowl different subsequent era applications such because the Joint All-Area Command and Management (JADC2) and the Synthetic Intelligence and Knowledge Acceleration (ADA) initiatives.
A solicitation launch does not imply the federal government is able to write massive checks to those cloud suppliers fairly but. Recipients should present focused proposal responses to the JWCC solicitation request. As soon as submitted, these responses shall be evaluated by DoD procurement and authorized groups utilizing a proper, structured overview course of to find out which vendor(s) are finest positioned to offer the requested companies.
All proposals are evaluated in opposition to the identical standards to determine distributors with the best chance of success, lowest attainable threat, and most reasonable value estimates. That is one situation the place a less expensive supply doesn’t essentially imply a greater supply.
The ensuing contract shall be awarded to profitable cloud suppliers underneath an Indefinite Supply/Indefinite Amount (IDIQ) contract.
An IDIQ contract means the profitable distributors can provide an indefinite amount of services or products (as requested by the federal government) over a hard and fast time frame. The award itself doesn’t assure work or funding to a vendor, however slightly serves as a looking license giving the pre-qualified recipient the flexibility to offer companies for any work issued underneath that IDIQ contract.
Whereas the JWCC solicitation could also be a “return of the JEDI” situation trying to acquire cloud assist underneath a brand new identify, there is no such thing as a assure that the procurement will not expertise the identical sorts of protest delays that plagued the earlier JEDI effort. DoD’s aim is to barter any IDIQ awards with certified distributors by the third quarter of 2022. However when billions of {dollars} are on the road, you may wager there is no such thing as a such factor as a gracious loser. Simply ask Amazon.
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