Longtime listeners will be amused to get an update on the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC, contract. According to Defense Information Systems Agency Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, the contract has already awarded 13 task orders worth over $200 million, with more on the way.
Of course, this contract is the successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which was canceled after considerable fighting over the award process, which I had enormous fun tracking on this show. Unlike the single-vendor approach of the JEDI contract, the JWCC involves services from multiple vendors, including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Why do we care?
Rather than a single, massive, winner-take-all-all deal, the government started working with multiple vendors and got contracts into the field. Take a lesson from that – sometimes, you don’t solve it with one super tool but instead make some progress incrementally. Who says government contracts don’t work?