Many people with an interest in the JEDI war cloud Pentagon contract were waiting in anticipation this week. The Department of Defense was working to an August 17 deadline to decide whether Microsoft should be the winner of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.
However, the DoD is asking for an additional 30 days to reach a decision. If allowed, the Pentagon would receive a new September 16 deadline.
Microsoft won the Pentagon’s controversial $10 billion war cloud Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. In doing so, the company defeated its main cloud rival, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon did not take the situation lying down and immediately started legal proceedings to stop Microsoft.
Following an investigation, the DoD was expected to reach a decision on whether Microsoft will receive the contract. Both Amazon and Microsoft were told to provide new proposals. A request was made through a court filing on August 10. FedScoop.com reports there are areas of proposals from Microsoft and Amazon that need to be revised.
Specifically, there are concerns “resulting in multiple solicitation amendments, rounds of proposal revisions, and exchanges with the offerors’ that have led it to need more time.”
Legal Battle
The JEDI war cloud contract is worth $10 billion to a winner. It will upgrade aging DoD systems onto new cloud services. It will give “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,” the Pentagon says.
Since Microsoft won the contract, Amazon started legal proceedings, won an injunction to stop the Pentagon and Microsoft from starting development, and called on President Trump to testify. Recently, a Department of Defense (DoD) report suggested the awarding of the contract to Microsoft fell within its guidelines.
