The Force is strong with this one? We have some news from the cloud sphere, and this time it has got to do with the JEDI contract that Microsoft and Amazon have been battling over.
This is the $10 billion contract that the Department of Defense handed to the Azure platform back in October 2019. AWS was deemed to be the frontrunner throughout the bidding process, but Redmond supposedly outbid it in the final rounds to win the deal.
Amazon filed a lawsuit challenging the decision to award the contract to Microsoft, citing political influence and errors.
And now there is some movement on this front, as the DoD has released a statement reaffirming that a originally planned, the JEDI contract will be awarded to Microsoft:
“The Department has completed its comprehensive re-evaluation of the JEDI Cloud proposals and determined that Microsoft’s proposal continues to represent the best value to the Government. The JEDI Cloud contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract that will make a full range of cloud computing services available to the DoD. While contract performance will not begin immediately due to the Preliminary Injunction Order issued by the Court of Federal Claims on February 13, 2020, DoD is eager to begin delivering this capability to our men and women in uniform.”
So that’s that.
Microsoft has maintained that the contract was offered to them because it offered significantly superior technology at a better price.
As things stand, the Pentagon will now procure cloud technologies from Redmond to modernize its systems and infrastructure. This win for Microsoft opens up more opportunities for Azure and related services in the government sector.
Something that the software titan been heavily focused on lately.
