Death of the JEDI: Pentagon Learning from Terminated Cloud Initiative.

• Author: Roaten, Meredith

When the Pentagon announced the cancelation of its highest-profile cloud computing initiative in July, not many were surprised.

The lucrative Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program, better known as JEDI, didn't make sense from a business perspective, said Alex Rossino, an advisory research analyst at Deltek. "It didn't make sense on any level, honestly."

The Pentagon awarded an eye-popping $10 billion contract to Microsoft in 2019, a decision that was swiftly protested by competitor Amazon Web Services and led to prolonged legal wrangling until the contract's cancelation this summer.

"Honestly, it was cursed from the beginning," said Willie Hicks, public sector chief technology officer at Dynatrace, a software artificial intelligence company based in Waltham, Massachusetts.

"The department has determined that, due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI cloud contract no longer meets its needs," the Pentagon said in a press release.

Acting Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman told reporters during a teleconference: "JEDI, conceived with noble intent at a baseline now several years old, was developed at a time when the department's needs were different and our cloud conversancy less mature."

Now, the military is shifting gears as it pursues a new cloud construct that will be the backbone of its joint all-domain command and control concept, which is meant to quickly connect sensors and shooters. The new program--known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC--will be a multi-vendor, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract effort.

While the Defense Department has lost time and resources pursuing JEDI, experts say the recent change of direction will not excessively delay the military's information-sharing goals as envisioned with JADC2.

Rossino, who studies IT market trends with an emphasis on defense, said JWCC is a stark departure from the "one-cloud-to-rule-them-all "approach of JEDI.

"The DoD has come to understand that the cloud is really just a certain type of infrastructure, and that the more important thing is what you do on that infrastructure--that's where the opportunity is," he said in an interview.

JWCC is a multi-cloud initiative that will be expected to provide capabilities at all three classification levels--unclassified, secret and top secret--and parity with services across all classification levels. It will integrate cross-domain solutions and have...