Solomon’s decision. The Pentagon will have four different vendors for its military-grade cloud computing and storage systems. The Department of Defense announced Wednesday that it had awarded orders to Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle for a maximum of $9,000 million (around €8,600 million). The new award replaces the award originally given to Microsoft during Donald Trump’s administration, which drew the ire of Amazon and was later revoked.
Information provided by the Pentagon indicates that there are no funds tied to any of the companies, but are specified upon request. Its distribution depends on each specific contract, and the fact that each company has been assigned the same limit of 9,000 million does not mean that the federal government will spend 36,000 million, as this is a multi-award contract where each company will do so will end up receiving orders for an unspecified amount.
“The objective of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with cloud services for the entire organization, which are available worldwide in all security domains and classification levels, from strategic to tactical,” the Pentagon explains in its press release. The contract was called Joint Combat Cloud Capability (JWCC).
The multi-billion dollar contract to use remote servers to store and process US defense information was first awarded in October 2019, at the time over $10 billion. The favorite at the time was Amazon, the clear leader in cloud computing, but the winner eventually became Microsoft after then-President Donald Trump personally entered the competition. Trump came into conflict with Amazon founder and major shareholder Jeff Bezos, also owner of the Washington Post, who criticized the president.
Amazon announced in November 2019 that it had initiated the procurement challenge process, known at the time as the Joint Defense Infrastructure Enterprise (JEDI). Oracle also appealed the award.
contract terminated
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The Department of Defense terminated the contract in July 2021, already with Joe Biden as President. “With today’s changing technology landscape, it has become clear that the long overdue JEDI cloud contract is no longer up to the task of filling the Department of Defense’s resource gaps,” he told the Pentagon at the time. In the public statement on the withdrawal from the contract, Amazon’s challenge was not mentioned, but the preference not to be dependent on a single provider was already indicated at the time.
Late last year, the Department of Defense invited Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle to bid, although it initially noted that only Amazon and Microsoft had the capacity to meet the requirements. Now, almost a year later, it has decided to split the multimillion-dollar technology deal between the four giants. Of these, Oracle is the company with the smallest cloud computing business. The volume of rewards each company will receive will be fixed throughout the life of the contract, which runs until June 2028.
Storing and processing large amounts of classified data in the cloud will allow the US military to improve communication with its troops on the battlefield and use artificial intelligence to accelerate its war planning and other ordnance. In addition to the economic value of the order itself, it can point the way for awards by other federal departments and authorities.
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