(Reuters) – The Pentagon awarded $9 billion worth of cloud computing contracts to Alphabet Inc’s Google, Amazon Web Services Inc, Microsoft Corp and Oracle Corp <ORCL.N> on Wednesday.
The Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) is the multi-cloud successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which was an IT modernization project to build a large, common commercial cloud for the Department of Defense.
The separate contracts, which carry a notional top line of $9 billion, run until 2028 and will provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide, globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, the contract announcement said.
U.S. Navy Commander Jessica McNulty, a Department of Defense spokesperson, said in a statement the JWCC was a multiple-award procurement composed of four contracts with a shared ceiling of $9 billion.
The move comes months after the Pentagon had delayed its decision to award an enterprise-wide JWCC contract.
The Pentagon attempted to move to the cloud several years ago using the JEDI concept, but the proposal died after litigation stopped the procurement process.
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This deal could put the military more in line with private-sector companies, many of whom split up their cloud computing work among multiple vendors.
(Reporting by Nathan Gomes in Bengaluru and Mike Stone in Washington D.C.; Editing by Stephen Coates and Gerry Doyle)