Cloud giants are going to have to wait a little longer for big bucks from the government, as the Defense Department pushed back its cloud infrastructure services contract allocation to the end of the year.

The reformed $9 billion collection of shorter-term contracts for the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) initiative will be awarded to multiple cloud providers in December, according to the agency.

It’s been a long, windy, and dramatic road for the Pentagon’s effort to modernize its infrastructure and technology with the aid of public clouds. After it awarded an exclusive $10 billion, 10-year contract to Microsoft in late 2019, Amazon vociferously contested the government’s decision as “politically corrupted” by the administration at the time.

Facing a prolonged legal battle, the Department of Defense eventually canceled the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract in mid-2021. The project was subsequently renamed and contracts were shortened to a three-year period with options for two-year extensions.

While the name is less catchy, the new initiative represents a larger contract value on a per-year basis and opens the field for multiple cloud providers to get a piece of the business.

The Pentagon reached out to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle in November, John Sherman, the agency’s CIO, said this week on a call with reporters, according to CNBC. 

“We’ve recognized that our schedule was maybe a little too ahead of what we thought, and now we’re going to wrap up in the fall and we’re aiming to award in December,” he said.

Contract awards for JWCC were originally set to go out in April 2022. The shift in strategy and multiple delays have undoubtedly impacted the Defense Department’s technology modernization plans.

The changes also underscore the government’s lack of foresight when the JEDI cloud contract was awarded. That initiative called for about 80% of the agency’s data to be moved off premises and into a single cloud, but the vast majority of enterprises rely on multiple clouds to minimize risk and avoid vendor lock-in.

Indeed, many cloud providers that lost out on that contract made this point throughout the ensuing legal battle.

The agency expects JWCC to reach a full, open, and competitively awarded multi-vendor cloud contract program by 2025.