Making an incredibly important leap into the modern world, the Pentagon has scuttled its desire to choose a single cloud provider and has instead gone multicloud by spreading its $9-billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract across the four hyperscalers: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.
While there’s no doubt an ungodly amount of confabbing and paperwork to be gone through before this project will actually get underway, two remarkably significant achievements are already in the “Win” column for this deal:
- the Pentagon has agreed to drop its “one vendor fits all” mindset; and
- it is embracing the multicloud reality that now pervades how midsize and large organizations optimize their strategies and operations.
Those are huge steps forward for the Defense Department, which, as one of the biggest spenders on planet Earth, has over time created procurement processes and policies that are about as nimble and pliable as Mount Everest. And the United States military now gains access to the best of what four of the world’s greatest technology companies can offer, rather than being bound inflexibly to what only one of those four can deliver.
That’s the core value and beauty of multicloud: The customer can pick and choose the best suppliers for specific needs, and simultaneously demand that the various cloud providers it has selected leave their competitive battles at the door and learn how to collaborate to deliver what the customer wants.
About seven months ago, I posted a Cloud Wars Minute video touching on the latest doomed attempt by the Pentagon to pick a sole cloud provider as the technology foundation for the United States military’s warfighting capabilities. I called that three-minute video “From AWS to Microsoft: the JEDI Contract Fairy Tale,” and my primary point was that this single-vendor approach was an unworkable fantasy, and that the players involved — including the Pentagon and the various hyperscalers vying for the deal — were all trying to mesmerize us with some goofy JEDI mind trick. (JEDI was the former acronym for the deal, which is now called JWCC for Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability.)
In that video, I said this single-vendor approach would never work because, as history showed us in the early years of the JEDI misadventure, the Pentagon would award the entire giant deal to a single vendor (first it was Amazon) and then others would appeal and the Pentagon would pick some other single cloud provider (next was Microsoft).
That infinity-loop would have gone on forever: A winner is announced, the losers appeal, the appeals process drags on, and then the worst of all outcomes gets added to the mix — politicians get involved, and an awful mess gets even worse.
My recommendation was for the Pentagon to wake up and join the 21st century and take the multicloud approach, breaking up the multibillion-dollar contract into pieces that would allow the U.S. military to gain the very best capabilities of each of those four extraordinary cloud providers.
So this outcome is great to see, and let us hope that in four more years we’re still not caught up in who does what but, instead, are putting the power of multicloud to work to create a safer world for everyone.
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