A coalition of technology companies has begun efforts to counter the Defense Department’s plan to pursue a single-award contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud procurement program, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
Sources told the publication the coalition includes Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, VMware, Red Hat, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, SAP’s U.S. arm and General Dynamics’ CSRA unit.
The report noted that Amazon is considered to be the frontrunner for the single-award JEDI cloud contract and sources said companies have initiated talks about plans to submit a joint proposal for the program.
The Pentagon has announced plans to award the cloud contract by September, the report added.
Dana Deasy, who assumed the chief information officer role at DoD in May, has been tapped to oversee the department-wide enterprise cloud computing initiative.