Another roadblock eliminated in the $10 billion JEDI bake-off between Microsoft and Amazon
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One of the last remaining hurdles to the awarding of the $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract known as JEDI, is gone. Oracle has lost its case, which challenged the contract on the grounds the Department of Defense violated procurement laws. Now the way is cleared for either Microsoft or Amazon to emerge as the winner who will take all.
Google dropped out of the JEDI bidding process late last year. Oracle and IBM were eliminated from the JEDI running in April 2019. Oracle officials had protested the bidding process, claiming bias against a former military employee who also worked at Amazon AWS. Oracle filed a lawsuit over this late last year. In February, it looked like the DoD was going to have to postpone the award of the contract as a result of a required review.
The Pentagon is expected to finally announce the JEDI winner in August 2019, Bloomberg says. However, a couple of Republican members of Congress have suggested the JEDI bidding process should be restarted because of potential conflicts of interest involving Amazon, as the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Also, as the Journal noted, the defense appropriations bill passed by the House on June 19, called for no funding to be spent on JEDI until the DoD explains how it will later transition to multiple cloud providers, rather than making it winner-take-all-only.
An Oracle spokesperson provided this statement on the July 12 federal claims court decision: "Oracle's cloud infrastructure 2.0 provides significant performance and security capabilities over legacy cloud providers. We look forward to working with the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and other public sector agencies to deploy modern, secure hyperscale cloud solutions that meet their needs."
The DoD's JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract is designed to upgrade legacy systems with newer cloud services. According to the original proposal, "JEDI Cloud will provide enterprise-level, commercial IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) to the Department and any mission partners for all Department business and mission operations."