- The Pentagon on Thursday in a court filing said it "wishes to reconsider" its decision to award the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract to Microsoft.
- Microsoft has yet to respond to a request for comment.
The Department of Defense on Thursday in a court filing said it "wishes to reconsider" its decision to award the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract to Microsoft.
Amazon Web Services, the other frontrunner for the contract, has alleged in a lawsuit that the JEDI award process was unfairly biased, and that Microsoft's Azure cloud didn't meet the technical requirements set forth by the Pentagon.
In the filing, the Department of Defense says that its decision to seek a reconsideration of the deal comes "in response to the other technical challenges presented by AWS."
Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting the court remand the case to the Department of Defense for 120 days to "reconsider certain aspects of the challenged agency decision." The filing also indicates that the Department of Defense won't seek additional bids from any other companies, but that it will rather reassess Microsoft Azure versus Amazon Web Services in light of the specific technical points raised by Amazon.
Microsoft has yet to respond to a request for comment.
Amazon has been fighting JEDI
The Pentagon awarded the $10 billion JEDI contract to Microsoft, in a stunning defeat for Amazon, whose Amazon Web Services — the dominant player in the cloud — was widely expected to win the project for building a massive platform that would store sensitive military and defense data. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft were selected as the two finalists in a contentious bidding process that initially included Oracle, IBM, and Google.
Amazon has challenged the decision in court, and a federal claims judge ordered work on the contract to stop while the case plays out. The judge also recently gave an indication that Amazon's challenge could be successful, writing in a that AWS can likely prove the Pentagon made an error in the evaluation process and that the error affected the outcome. Microsoft disagrees.
When the Department of Defense solicited bidders for JEDI, a requirement for one aspect of the proposal called "Price Scenario 6" was for online storage to be "highly accessible." Amazon alleges Microsoft's proposal did not meet that requirement.
Amazon alleges it should have been enough to eliminate Microsoft from the competition. The judge said Amazon is likely to be able to prove the DOD improperly evaluated Microsoft's proposal, and that Amazon's "chance of securing the award was not insubstantial absent the error."
"DoD does not intend to conduct discussions with offerors or to accept proposal revisions with respect to any aspect of the solicitation other than Price Scenario 6," the DoD said in the filing. "At this time, DoD does not anticipate clarifications being necessary on issues other than the offerors' online marketplace offerings."
Microsoft earlier this week told Business Insider its proposal does meet the requirement, and the DOD argues Amazon "seeks to elevate superficial labels over technical performance," and that if Microsoft's proposal didn't meet the requirement, neither did Amazon's.
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