DISA applies lessons learned on JEDI to next-gen cloud contract

DefenseNews covers DISA Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner’s appearance at the AFCEA TechNet conference in Augusta, Georgia, where he spoke on the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program, which replaced the troubled Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). DOD released a draft of JEDI’s winner-take-all approach in March 2018 and more than three years later, in July 2021, the JEDI award to Microsoft was canceled. In November 2021, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle received JWCC RFPs, and each received an award with a collective ceiling of $9 billion.

The next iteration of JWCC will focus on three areas: accelerating contracting processes, expanding the vendor pool, and incorporating advanced technologies (such as, of course, AI). Of note:

JWCC has awarded $996 million in contracts to date, with an additional $20 million in progress
All four military services are actively utilizing the JWCC program
The Pentagon aims to streamline the contracting process further in the next phase
Plans include increasing the number of participating companies and integrating more advanced capabilities

Skinner also highlighted progress on DODNET, a DISA-run secure network connecting Fourth Estate agencies that has onboarded 32,000 users and is ready to begin a six- to nine-month sprint to onboard another 100,000, including from Defense Contract Audit Agency, Defense Contract Management Agency, and Defense Finance and Accounting Service.