JEDI leaves room for other clouds

The Defense Department's massive developing commercial cloud contract leaves room for smaller commercial cloud projects, according to a top deputy in the Army CIO's office.

Experimental pilot cloud operations aren't in conflict with the Pentagon's $10 billion single-source Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, said Major General Garrett Yee, the Army's deputy CIO.

Bids for the JEDI project were due last week. Amazon and Microsoft have signaled their intention to bid. Oracle filed a pre-award protest, alleging that the solicitation is purpose-built for a single vendor. IBM plans to bid on the cloud contract but is also filing a pre-award protest, hoping to induce DOD to rewrite the solicitation to allow for multiple clouds.

In remarks at an Oct. 18 Northern Virginia chapter AFCEA luncheon, Yee said JEDI is meant to focus DOD's attention on moving to the commercial cloud in an organized way as it is implemented.

At the same event, Edward Siomacco, deputy director, enterprise systems operations directorate, G-43 Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff at the Army's G-4 headquarters, said the Army Business Council has begun a commercial cloud pilot to shift some enterprise resource planning systems to the hosting environment, he said.

The idea of the six-month trial, he said, is to see how those ERP systems for finance might be hosted in "an affordable environment."

That kind of pilot effort, said Yee, "isn't in conflict" with JEDI's larger goals of moving the warfighting functions of DOD to the commercial cloud.