The JEDI contract is back, somewhat, with Pentagon inviting bids for new Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract

The Pentagon has cancelled their $10 billion JEDI contract after persistent litigation by Amazon meant the scope of the project has become completely outdated.

The defence service is now back with a new tender, which it anticipates awarding equally to Amazon and Microsoft, thereby ending the bickering and actually getting something useful in the field.

The Pentagon is inviting bids for their new Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract. The Indefinite-Delivery, Indefinite-Quantity (IDIQ) contract is open to all cloud vendors and the government said it “intends to award [contracts] to all Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) that demonstrate the capability to meet DoD’s requirements.”

The shortlist of those with the right capabilities, which include resilient and globally accessible services, advanced data analytics, fortified security and tactical edge devices, among other things, is however very short. Only AWS and Microsoft “appear to be capable of meeting all of the DoD’s requirements at this time, including providing cloud services at all levels of national security classification,” the US General Services Administration said.

This assessment is not stopping other companies such as Google and Oracle from bidding, however, with Google’s Cloud chief Thomas Kurian writing in a blog post that Google would “absolutely bid” on the new JWCC contract if invited to do so, in spite of employee concerns in recent years over the company’s involvement with the Defense Department.

via ZDNet