Pentagon Wants More Time to Review JEDI Cloud Contract Bids

In a court filing Monday, the Defense Department requested a 30-day extension to issue an award decision in its multibillion-dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract. 

The Defense Department had planned to award JEDI by Aug. 17 after numerous delays, including a 120-day remand sought by the agency in March to take corrective action on issues identified in a legal protest by Amazon Web Services after the Pentagon initially awarded Microsoft the contract in October.

“During the remand, DoD has identified areas of concern with respect to the revised proposals received from both offerors, resulting in multiple solicitation amendments, rounds of proposal revisions, and exchanges with the offerors,” the filing states. “In evaluating each offeror’s final proposal revisions, however, DoD has recently identified the need to reopen limited discussions related to certain aspects of the offerors’ pricing proposals.”

The filing indicates both companies would have another chance to submit questions and a revised bid.

“DoD anticipates that the re-evaluation process will be complete by early September,” the filing states.

On July 30, Pentagon Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said he expected a JEDI award by the end of August. However, delays have become commonplace for JEDI, which is considered one of the Pentagon’s most high-profile technology contracts in years. Through it, officials hope to link together worldwide military systems at all classification levels from various military departments into a single, unified architecture. DOD officials have also repeatedly said that an enterprise cloud is essential to advance the department’s artificial intelligence projects. However, the contract has been protested four times and is approximately two years behind schedule.