Google, Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft gain Pentagon contract

The Pentagon has announced that it has awarded its cloud computing contract - which could reach a ceiling value of $9bn - to Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. 

All of the four successful companies had been sent requests for bids from the US federal agency last year.

The details of the Pentagon’s JWCC cloud contract

The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) award adheres to the wider effort of the US Defense Department to use multiple providers of remotely operated infrastructure technology, rather than depending on one single company. 

This was a strategy that was largely promoted during the Trump Administration, and it is a trend that is being replicated by an increasing number of American businesses. 

The Pentagon had, originally, awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure to Microsoft, which was announced in 2019. However, the decision launched a series of legal challenges, as both Amazon (which was the market’s cloud infrastructure leader at the time) and Oracle sought to question this decision. 

Although the Pentagon’s watchdog later ruled that there was no evidence for intervention from the administration when awarding the JEDI contract to Microsoft. 

Nonetheless, the Pentagon adopted a different approach for the JWCC contract, asking for bids from multiple providers, including all four of the successful companies - Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. 

"The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge," commented the Defense Department, in a recent statement. 

Interestingly however, at the time of issuing the bids, the General Services Administration stated its belief that only Amazon and Microsoft would be able to meet the full requirements of the Pentagon.