The JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, deal has become one of the most hotly contested contracts for the Department of Defense.
The Pentagon said Friday it will stick with Microsoft for a major cloud contract that has been disputed in court for months. The JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, deal has become one of the most hotly contested contracts for the Department of Defense. The contract is intended to modernize the Pentagon’s colossal IT infrastructure and could be valued up to $10 billion for services rendered over as many as 10 years. «The Department has completed its comprehensive re-evaluation of the JEDI Cloud proposals and determined that Microsoft’s proposal continues to represent the best value to the Government,» the Pentagon said in a statement. «The JEDI Cloud contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract that will make a full range of cloud computing services available to the DoD. While contract performance will not begin immediately due to the Preliminary Injunction Order issued by the Court of Federal Claims on February 13, 2020, DoD is eager to begin delivering this capability to our men and women in uniform.» The outcome represents a loss for Amazon, which challenge the award of the contract after the Pentagon gave it to Microsoft in October. Amazon said in a Friday blog post that it will continue to seek a review of the situation and that the Pentagon’s re-evaluation of the companies’ proposals simply validated the original decision to go with Microsoft. «‘Corrective action’ was used as a way to halt our litigation, delay further investigations and incorrectly give the appearance that only one issue needed to be fixed while giving the impression that the DoD was actually going to fix something,» Amazon said. «While corrective action can be used to efficiently resolve protests, in reality, this corrective action changed nothing, wasted five months that could have been spent getting to the bottom of these serious concerns, and was designed solely to distract from our broader concerns and reaffirm a decision that was corrupted by the President’s self-interest.
