The Department of Defense has devised a new procurement approach to guide the task order award process for its new multibillion-dollar cloud computing contract vehicle, Federal News Network reported Friday.
Danielle Metz, the Pentagon’s deputy chief information officer for information enterprise, said DOD plans to award separate indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program to a sole contractor chosen by a centralized program office.
According to Metz, the Pentagon will employ an account tracking and automation tool housed within the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Hosting and Compute Center to keep track of JWCC contractors’ service offerings and prices to inform the decision-making process of the cloud computing program office.
Under the proposed acquisition process, contractors Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Google are most likely to each receive single-award IDIQs. In November, DOD issued directed solicitations to the four companies to compete for JWCC, which will replace the $10 billion single-award Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract.
Metz said the goal of the new procurement approach is to accelerate the cloud acquisition process and reduce the time it takes to award a task order from the usual 30 to 45 days to just five to 10 days.
“This is very revolutionary, and I think it shows the department’s commitment in terms of wanting to transform our business processes so that we can get effective capabilities quicker to our warfighter,” said Metz.
