Pentagon adamant on cloud contract
The Defense Department isn’t budging from its decision to award a single contract for a cloud-computing project — and isn’t saying why — in a public exchange with vendors over details of the multibilliondollar competition.
The Pentagon posted answers to 1,089 questions raised by 46 companies, two associations and three government agencies. The comments were posted anonymously Monday, with the military’s response alongside each entry.
Rival contractors complain that the winner-takeall approach favors Amazon. com, the biggest supplier of cloud services. But Pentagon officials made clear that they have little patience for continuing debate over the issue. In response to a question on the “rationale for a single award for this contract,” the answer posted was blunt: “This rationale is not going to be published at this time.”
In an interview, Tim Van Name, deputy director of the Defense Digital Service, which is oversee-
ing the contract competition, said “I don’t see the value” of more exchanges because “we’ve made it clear that we are going forward with a single award,” and “it is not something that we believe is up for debate with industry.”
“It was a decision the department made based on its needs, so adding context there doesn’t benefit us,” he said.
The process for selecting a winner will include input from committees “heavily filled with folks who are technical experts — representative across the services,” Van Name said. These experts “understand the technologies and specific department needs.”
Cloud services — in which computing power and storage are hosted in remote data centers run by a third-party company rather than on-site in locally owned machines — can make it easier for large organizations to move and integrate data across different platforms, quickly expand the data storage they need based on usage and make systemwide security upgrades to software.
IBM, one of the potential bidders, responded to the Pentagon’s posted comments with an argument that captured the sentiment of those pushing to divide the prized contract into multiple awards.
“No major commercial enterprise in the world would risk a single cloud solution, and neither should the Pentagon,” Sam Gordy, general manager of IBM’s federal business arm, said in a statement. “IBM will continue to urge that America’s defense cloud be multilayered, robust, and consistent with the best practice used by every major cloud user in the world.”
Tech companies jockeying for a piece of the contract argue that a single-source approach will stifle innovation and increase security risks. Oracle Corp. has been leading a campaign along with other tech giants to unseat Amazon Web Services as the perceived front-runner for the job, according to people familiar with the matter.
In the comments and questions posted by the Pentagon, three entries advanced almost identical arguments that the Defense Department has failed to comply with government regulations requiring a contract officer to provide a justification for not making multiple awards. Such issues could be advanced to challenge a winner-take-all award before the Government Accountability Office and in the courts.
Another industry comment said the contract could extend as long as a decade, “nearly equal to the age of the cloud market” and “fails to recognize how fast this market is changing.”
The government also issued a revised draft proposal Monday, clarifying specific requirements that must be met under FedRamp, or the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a framework for handling unclassified data, Van Name said.
The new draft also says that the prime contractor must have the ability “to maintain control over certain parts of JEDI Cloud,” a formulation that could open the way for more competitors than the original proposal, which would have required the winner to “demonstrate ownership of the proposed hardware infrastructure.”
The Pentagon reiterated that while it will award a single contract, the eventual winner could be made up of a team of companies. The contract, known as JEDI — for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud Program — won’t prevent the Defense Department from working with other cloud vendors in the future, Lt. Col. Kaight Meyers, program manager for the cloud initiative, said in a letter posted along with the comments and responses and the revised proposal.
“JEDI Cloud is intended to be available enterprise-wide and complementary to other existing cloud initiatives. It will not preclude the release of future contracting actions,” Meyers said.
The Defense Department has said it’s making the shift to the cloud to give it a tactical edge in the battlefield and strengthen its use of emerging technologies. The department plans to issue the final request for proposal by May 15 and award the contract by the end of September, Van Name said.