- Microsoft was recently named the winner of an estimated $10 billion U.S. Department of Defense JEDI cloud contract over AWS. These are the details.
Microsoft was named as the winner of an estimated $10 billion U.S. Department of Defense Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. Amazon’s AWS was also in the running and was predicted to be the winning bidder for a while.
Eventually, Microsoft and Amazon were the final two bidders after Google dropped out of the JEDI bidding last year and IBM and Oracle were eliminated. Oracle filed a lawsuit against the government citing conflicts of interest, but lost the challenge.
Earlier this year, the Pentagon put the JEDI contract on hold due to President Donald Trump’s criticism of Jeff Bezos. Bezos owns The Washington Post, which is a publication that scrutinizes the Trump administration and frequently fact checks the President of the United States.
The JEDI contract focuses primarily on upgrading legacy systems. And the JEDI Cloud is intended to provide enterprise-level, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service to the Department and partners for all mission operations. The $10 billion contract is likely to be spread over the course of 10 years.
In the past two years, the Department of Defense has awarded more than $11 billion across 10 separate cloud contracts. And this “acquisition process was conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. The process cleared review by the GAO and Court of Federal Claims. At the outset the competition included four different offerors. All offerors were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria. Prior to the award, the department conferred with the DOD Inspector General, which informed the decision to proceed.”
The DoD will continue assessing and pursuing various cloud contracting opportunities to diversify the capabilities of the DoD Enterprise Cloud Environment. And additional contracting opportunities are anticipated.
“The National Defense Strategy dictates that we must improve the speed and effectiveness with which we develop and deploy modernized technical capabilities to our women and men in uniform,” said DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy. “The DOD Digital Modernization Strategy was created to support this imperative. This award is an important step in execution of the Digital Modernization Strategy.”
This was a big hit for Amazon’s AWS and it caught the company off-guard. A number of analysts were expecting AWS to win the deal.
“We’re surprised about this conclusion,” added an AWS representative in a statement via Business Insider. “AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion. We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.”
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