Pentagon is still deciding on AWS or Microsoft for JEDI deal
The US Department of Defense was supposed to announce whether AWS or Microsoft had been awarded the the Pentagon’s $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract this week after it was given a 120-day stay to reconsider parts of the contract and collect revised bids from both cloud giants.
However, the Pentagon recently requested for an additional 30 days to come to a final decision on the matter, pushing the deadline back to September 16.
As reported by Nextgov, the DoD provided additional details on its August 10 request to push back the deadline in a court filing, which reads:
“During the remand, DoD has identified areas of concern with respect to the revised proposals received from both offerors, resulting in multiple solicitation amendments, rounds of proposal revisions, and exchanges with the offerors. In evaluating each offeror’s final proposal revisions, however, DoD has recently identified the need to reopen limited discussions related to certain aspects of the offerors’ pricing proposals.”
JEDI contract
Once it’s finally awarded to either AWS or Microsoft, the JEDI contract will be used to upgrade legacy DoD systems with newer cloud services.
When the Pentagon’s $10bn cloud contract was first announced, AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Google all put in bids to work on the project. However, Amazon was believed to be the favorite to win the JEDI contract after IBM, Oracle and even Google dropped out of the bidding process. This is why it came as such a surprise when Microsoft was awarded the JEDI contract in October of 2019.
AWS then filed a suit claiming that US President Donald Trump had personally interfered in the bidding process which led to Microsoft being awarded the contract.
We will soon know once and for all which company will be awarded the lucrative JEDI contract unless of course, the deadline gets pushed back once again.
Via ZDNet