Pentagon eyes end of August for JEDI cloud award

The Pentagon expects to award the potential 10-year, $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft within the next two months, according to the Defense Department's chief information officer, as a lawsuit challenging the JEDI solicitation appears close to a resolution.

DOD expects to complete the source selection process for JEDI by the end of August, DOD CIO Dana Deasy told reporters today at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington. He said Oracle America's lawsuit in the Court of Federal Claims is not impeding the ongoing source selection process.

Oracle is seeking an injunction against DOD proceeding with the award, as it argues the Pentagon's gate criteria are unfair and its single-source determination flawed. The company also alleges multiple DOD employees worked to tailor the program’s requirements in a way favorable to AWS and then left the government to work for Amazon, according to the lawsuit.

Deasy did not comment on the details of the case, but noted the court has a potentially decisive hearing scheduled for July. In recent weeks, Oracle has filed a motion for judgement on the case, while DOD and AWS have asked the judge to throw out the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, Deasy said his office has led "cloud awareness sessions" over the past six months with several of the combatant commands and representatives from the military services to prepare them for migrating to the "general purpose" JEDI cloud.

"Now that we're getting closer, it's the logical time to sit down with the various services, start to describe what we believe a general purpose cloud environment will start to look like, and more importantly for them to start thinking about what activity sets they have coming up this fall and going into next year that might be good candidates [for transition]," Deasy said.

AWS and Microsoft are the only two contractors in the running for the award, after DOD determined they are the only companies who could meet the requirements for the massive cloud project.

Deasy said the services and COCOMs will have a better understanding of how to migrate and design applications for the cloud environment once the Pentagon decides between AWS and Microsoft.

"Until we complete the selection of who that partner will be, that then leads to starting to understand what that general-purpose cloud will look like," he said. "And then how do we start to train people on how to leverage and take advantage of that."