And thus, begins a new chapter in the cloud wars! Amazon has challenged the recent award of the prestigious $10 billion JEDI contract to Microsoft, citing what it calls unmistakable bias.
The deal of the year saw Oracle and IBM being removed from competition earlier in the season, while Amazon Web Services itself was knocked out much nearer to the finish line.
Originally, the Pentagon was expected to announce a winner in September, but the timeline was delayed after US President Donald Trump himself expressed concerns regarding the fairness of the process, saying he had received complaints from companies.
The deal was put to review in August. Not long after that, DoD selected Microsoft Azure for this blockbuster deal, in what many see as an upset.
And now, Amazon is accusing the Department of Defense of succumbing to political pressure. This is not at all surprising when you pair this development with the fact that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, is a frequent target of Trump.
A company spokesperson laid it out loud and clear:
“AWS is uniquely experienced and qualified to provide the critical technology the U.S. military needs, and remains committed to supporting the DoD’s modernization efforts. We also believe it’s critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence. Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias- and it’s important that these matters be examined and rectified.”
Time to call in the lawyers!
While Pentagon officials are saying that they would not speculate on potential litigation, the Microsoft leadership is also quiet on the matter.
The JEDI project will see the Department of Defense migrate its IT infrastructure to the cloud in order to create a globally available and responsive network that will also provide ongoing monitoring of issues like bugs and breaches.
The deal will also see the organization apply modern computing techniques like AI and machine learning to its defense operations.
