The Department of Defense is conducting a full review of the acquisition process for its multi-billion dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud, the Pentagon’s new CIO said Wednesday.
Dana Deasy, the lead DoD technology official, told attendees at the Defense Systems Summit there is no confirmed date for when an official request for proposals will be released, but that the department was focused on reworking the procurement approach to maximize industry engagement.
“We are conducting a full, top-down, bottom-up review of this effort,” Deasy said. “I would say we’re not a long ways off. We have a bit more work to do before it will be released. But what I’m not going to do is commit to a specific date”
The Pentagon missed the original May deadline to post the final RFP for JEDI. Officials previously announced an industry day in March that an award was scheduled for September.
The enterprise cloud project has received industry pushback for its sole-source contract framework being perceived as structured for a large company such as Amazon [AMZN] Web Services.
“When the JEDI RFP is released, I am confident that our requirements will be clear and will maximize responses,” Deasy said.
Deasy, who was sworn in as the new DoD CIO in May, was officially tasked with leading all cloud efforts for the department at the end of last month (Defense Daily, June 11).