Amazon Challenges Pentagon’s $10 Billion Contract To Microsoft

Amazon said on Thursday, that it is going to challenge a $10 billion contract awarded to Microsoft last month by Pentagon. Amazon called the decision-making process prejudiced and tainted by “political influence.” 

The Department of Defense had been considering a number of bids for a cloud computing project, “Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure” or JEDI initiative. The project, that has been delayed for a long period of time, is supposed to update the computing infrastructure of the Pentagon. Most of the agency’s technology relies on systems from the 1980s and 1990s. 

A number of people had expected the contract would be awarded to Amazon Web Services, which commands about 48% of the cloud computing market share. Over the past year, President Donald Trump has increased his attacks on Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. Weighing in on the contract, he said in July, that he had considered intervening in the award process. 

“Great companies are complaining about it,” Trump said at that time, mentioning that this contract was one of the “biggest” ever. “So we’re going to take a look at it. We’ll take a very strong look at it.”

Last Friday on November 8, Amazon officially filed a notice to protest the decision and it is being filed in the US Court of Federal Claims. A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said in a statement to HuffPost, 

“AWS is uniquely experienced and qualified to provide the critical technology the U.S. military needs and remains committed to supporting the DoD’s modernization efforts. We also believe it’s critical for our country that the government and its elected leaders administer procurements objectively and in a manner that is free from political influence. Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors and unmistakable bias and it’s important that these matters be examined and rectified.”

Pentagon has more than 500 separate cloud systems throughout the military and through JEDI, it is intended to unify all the systems under one umbrella. This will help Pentagon keep up with the developments n the civilian computing industry.