Lily Zeleke, acting deputy chief information officer at the Department of Defense, said DOD is on schedule to award the potential $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract by the end of 2022, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.
“December 2022 is still the date we’re aiming for, for awards,” Zeleke said at an event Wedneday. “I can tell you we’re progressing well, and we anticipate to meet that date.”
In July 2021, the Pentagon launched JWCC as a multivendor procurement to replace the single-award Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud program and provide a capability to link forces across ground, air, space, maritime and cyber domains in support of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control effort.
In November 2021, the department invited Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and Google to compete for the JWCC contract.
DOD originally planned to award the JWCC contract in April but decided to push back the award window to provide time for additional due diligence.
“It’s actually really exciting to have that coming forth, because it’s imperative to our ability to do Joint All-Domain Command and Control, JADC2, as you’ve heard,” Zeleke said.
“We’ve also learned over the years that we’ve been doing cloud that it’s imperative that we do our due diligence, and we pivot when necessary, to make sure that we are going to arrive at something that is going to meet the warfighters’ needs, the stakeholders’ needs,” she added.
