Continually evaluating companies' expected income from multi-billion dollar Pentagon contracts is part art form and part horse race. And, in terms of hard cash, a contract modification made public this morning shows that Oracle pulled ahead of Microsoft in the Pentagon's long-anticipated $9 billion successor to its cancelled JEDI cloud computing award, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract (or, JWCC).

Before contract modifications became public, it would only be fair to assume an equal split of the potential $9 billion JWCC pie between the four receipients: Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google (indeed, this was Tech Inquiry's approach in a report last year). But, as a result of 90-day delays in proactive Department of Defense procurement disclosures, delivery orders revealing more information on the financial split started becoming public this month. (Tech Inquiry was, to the best of our knowledge, the first to report the initial split, with Microsoft in the lead.)

As of today, public records for JWCC show that Oracle has been obligated $4,445,952.98, Microsoft $3,598,000, Google $914,800, and Amazon a mere $100,000. However, each company's delivery orders underneath the shared $9 billion ceiling contract have their own maximum payout: roughly $70.77 million for Microsoft, $40.95 million for Oracle, and $16.84 million for Google. (Amazon still has no public delivery order under JWCC.)

Each of these three delivery orders has a completion date of December 7, 2023, and so their ceilings serve as a reasonable estimate of the expected amounts each company should receive on JWCC by the end of the year. Thus, while Oracle is currently ahead on obligations, Microsoft's larger delivery order ceiling suggests that Microsoft is likely to overtake Oracle again in the coming months.

You can view Tech Inquiry's feed on the four JWCC awards to Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon here. As it stands, perhaps the biggest surprise is that Amazon has yet to receive a public delivery order on JWCC.