As the Defense Department is gearing up for the next phase of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, DoD’s top IT officials are considering streamlining contracting processes and bringing on more cloud service providers.

The Defense Department has already made over 65 task orders worth over $1 billion — a significant milestone for the department. The JWCC contract could be worth up to $9 billion over 10 years if DoD decides to exercise all its available options.

“$1 billion worth of task orders — it’s pretty powerful when a year and a half ago, people said we wouldn’t be able to even do the contract because of the issues that we had with [Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure ] and some other contracting means, but now we’re looking at JWCC Next,” Defense Information Systems Agency Director Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner said last week.

“What it’s going to bring is even faster commercial cloud capability, greater diversity where we can hope that we can have even more cloud service providers and potentially have an option of not having task orders competed, that we can have an [indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity] as well as task order competition.”

Identifying new requirements

The Defense Department hasn’t offered clear timelines for the next phase of the contract, but Les Benito, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Hosting and Compute Center’s chief of product development and management, told reporters the department is already identifying additional requirements that need to be included in the next contract.

“We are working with the services, the CIOs, the combatant commands, the fourth estate. We are starting to think through some of the lessons learned — what did we miss? What are things that we need to include in the next contract?” Benito said.

“We’ve had several modifications to the contract already where some of the things that, if you think back, it took quite a while between JEDI originally and then JWCC. Some of the things that we needed initially and we thought we needed have changed because cloud changes and capabilities change. So it’s just a continuous mod to better serve our customers based on new capabilities and the new ways that folks are using cloud.”

The task orders under JWCC span various classification levels and vary in capabilities and services. The contract is also being used to support the department’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2.

Benito said the average lead time for task orders is 25 days, although it varies depending on the size and competition of the award.

“It depends on how complicated their requests are and what they’re looking for, and what that competition looks like between the vendors — that extends it a little bit more. Some have been very quick, some have been a few days, but 25 is our average,” Benito said.

Last year, former DoD Chief Information Officer John Sherman directed the services to use JWCC “for all available offerings to procure future enterprise cloud computing capabilities and services.”

“It is picking up steam a little bit. Folks that actually were able to plan for their financials and budgets are starting to come to fruition,” Benito said.

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