Microsoft again won the Pentagon’s 10 Billion JEDI Contract

Despite amazon protests that President Trump interfered to discourage it from winning the $10 billion contract, the Defense Department confirmed on Friday its decision to grant Microsoft a massive cloud computing contract.  By the Pentagon, the Department of Defense said in a statement, On Friday, that it had completed its investigation into the awarding of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, an investigation it pursued to determine whether there were discrepancies in the procurement process.

The Department of Defense said it had “settled the highest benefit to the government from Microsoft’s proposal,” stating that “contractual performance would not start immediately.” This is because in February, after Amazon sued, a judge granted a temporary injunction, alleging that the contract had been shut down because President Trump was accused of having animosity against the CEO Jeff Bezos. Amazon claimed that there were “clear deficiencies, mistakes, and unmistakable bias” in the process of contract award. The deal includes cloud computing service to the Pentagon, including basic storage and resources, artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads.

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Although President Trump said last July he had looked the contract after complaints about the bidding process and was concerned about the political influence in the decision as The government awarded the contract to Microsoft in October 2019. Oracle and IBM were both proposing to join into the deal but were discontinued from the process in April 2018. Oracle had challenged the decision in court and lost its latest legal appeal earlier this week.

Microsoft will retain the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract, beats Amazon again

On Friday, The company was gladly prepared to work on the project, said a Microsoft spokesperson. “We appreciate that after careful review, The DoD confirmed that we offered the right technologies and better value “. said the Spokesman.

The company deeply disagreed with this decision, calling the Defense Department’s reevaluation of the contract  nothing more than an attempt to validate a flawed, biased, and politically corrupted decision.” A Friday article on the Amazon Web Services public sector site.

“What we also ask ourselves is if the President of the United States should be allowed to use the Department of Defense budget to pursue his own private and political ends”. Amazon will continue a ”fair, objective and unbiased analysis” of the process, he added.

The Pentagon’s JEDI contract aims to procure cloud technologies from the tech giant to modernize the DoD’s systems and infrastructure. The success of Microsoft also gives the company in the government sector more opportunities.

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