The U.S. Pentagon has canceled the JEDI cloud contract that it awarded to Microsoft in 2019, CNBC reported. JEDI stands for Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. The Pentagon stated in a press release that “due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs.”
As you may recall, Microsoft and Amazon were both seeking to obtain the $10 billion JEDI project. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense selected Microsoft and Amazon got really annoyed about that, going so far as to declare that it would continue protesting this decision.
In a press release the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) stated: “… The Department continues to have unmet cloud capability gaps for enterprise-wide, commercial cloud services at all three classification levels that work at the tactical edge, at scale — these needs have only advanced in recent years with efforts such as Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration (ADA) initiative.”
Microsoft posted the following on its blog: “…The 20 months since DoD selected Microsoft as its JEDI partner highlights issues that warrant the attention of policymakers: when one company can delay, for years, critical technology upgrades for those who defend our nation, the protest process needs reform. Amazon filed its protest in November of 2019 and its case was expected to take at least another year to litigate and yield a decision, with potential appeals afterward.”
In its press release, the DoD announced a new contract for its cloud efforts. The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) will be a multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract. DoD will seek proposals from a limited number of sources, including Microsoft Corporation and Amazon Web Services.
Based on past events, I think that if Microsoft wins the contract, Amazon will continue complain and litigate about it.