The Pentagon on Thursday released the final version of its proposal for the 10-year, $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud project, with officials sticking to the effort’s single-award contract structure despite industry pushback.

The final JEDI RFP arrives after officials missed an original May deadline and the Department of Defense’s new CIO completed a full review of the program’s acquisition structure.iStock Cyber Lock

“DoD has an incredibly unique and complex technology estate and finite set of talent and resources,” DoD CIO Dana Deasy said in a statement. “We need help learning how to put in place an enterprise cloud, and the JEDI Cloud is a pathfinder effort that will help DoD do that.”

JEDI is the Pentagon’s massive cloud project aimed at overhauling the department’s IT systems to improve security, data analytics and operational capabilities.

Following the rollout of the program at a March industry day, the contract structure received pushback from industry for its aggressive timeline and single-award structure potentially creating bias toward the largest cloud computing companies, such as Amazon [AMZN] Web Services.

The final RFP confirms that DoD is sticking with a single-award structure and confirmed that the contract will be worth $10 billion.

An eventual contract award will start with a two-year base period, and be followed by two three-year follow-up options and then an additional two-year option.

“The DoD CIO conducted a full, top-down, bottom-up review of the final RFP before it was released to ensure that the final RFP reflects DoD’s requirements and will maximize responses,” Heather Babb, a DoD spokeswoman, told Defense Daily.

The official proposal arrives the same day as the House passed the final version of the fiscal year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which contains a provision withholding 15 percent of DoD cloud computing funding pending a a report from leadership on its approach to JEDI (Defense Daily, July 25).

“The Department is committed to continuing the dialogue with Congress on this important topic,” Babb said.