Pentagon officials gearing up for JWCC Next enterprise cloud program solicitation

The Pentagon plans to issue a solicitation for the next iteration of its high-dollar enterprise cloud initiative in the first quarter of calendar year 2026, according to a senior official at the Defense Information Systems Agency.

In December 2022, Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were awarded contract spots on the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program and have been competing for task orders. To date, more than $3 billion in task orders have been awarded, according to John Hale, chief of product management and development at DISA.

However, officials are looking to shake things up with a follow-on effort, dubbed JWCC Next, with the request for proposals set to come early in 2026, which corresponds with the second quarter of fiscal 2026.

“When we launched the JWCC contract several years ago, it was mainly focused on how do we get the Department of Defense access to the hyperscale providers,” Hale said Thursday at an event hosted by Defense One. “It’s been very successful and it’s worked out very well. When we started working with the other cloud brokers within the department, we started to realize that they were leveraging capabilities that we didn’t necessarily make available on the JWCC contract. And the big one was access to third party — the third-party marketplace, the third-party vendors, right? And so we actually modded the JWCC contract to enable that capability so that we could help, you know, link the [military services such as the] Army and Air Force as they make their journeys into the various cloud environments.”

For JWCC Next, the Pentagon wants to further expand that access.

“When we set the groundwork for the JWCC Next contract, which is in development right now, it’s in the acquisition strategy phase, we’re working very closely with the chief acquisition executive at DISA and with [the Acquisition and Sustainment directorate] at the Pentagon to roll out that vehicle. And the plan is to get it on the street, basically second quarter of FY ’26, with an award [in] early ’27. And so the idea there is to provide a broader access to the various commercial cloud providers that are out there. As far as, you know, how broad, we’ll have to see who bids on the proposal. But … the idea is to expose more and more of the cloud providers to the [military] services,” Hale said.

JWCC Next is expected to supersede the current enterprise cloud contract vehicle, not supplement it, he suggested.

“There will be an overlap for transition purposes, but … the expectation is the JWCC Next contract will replace it,” Hale told DefenseScoop.

“One of the things we’re doing with the JWCC Next contract is we’re looking at how we can make it a longer contract term. So, we’re working with A&S specifically on that right now, so we don’t have that transition every five years,” he added.

Hale declined to provide an estimate for how many vendors might be awarded for JWCC Next.

“Until the contract hits the street and we start to get the bids in, I could not speculate,” he told DefenseScoop.