Pentagon cancels $10 billion JEDI cloud contract delayed by Microsoft, Amazon feud – By Andrew Eversden (C4ISRNET) / July 6 2021
This story has been updated with additional comments from the Defense Department.
WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense announced Tuesday it canceled its contract with Microsoft for an enterprise cloud to bring decisive data to the battlefield, a nearly four-year-old project that never started because of a challenge by Amazon Web Services.
Citing the delays, a DoD spokesperson said the requirements of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract worth up to $10 billion “no longer meets the department’s cloud needs,” and the Pentagon announced an alternative to work with both companies, the only two the DoD has found that are capable of filling its requirements.
With the new Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, AWS — along with Microsoft — is likely to win a piece of the lucrative business it has sought since the acquisition stage for JEDI cloud started 2017. AWS eventually challenged the single-company award in court, partly over accusations that then-President Donald Trump interfered with the decision because of his public feud with Jeff Bezos, who just stepped down as Amazon CEO.
The department plans to send Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability solicitations to the two tech giants in mid-October and said the pair will “likely” be direct awardees, acting DoD CIO John Sherman said. The department aims to make awards to the vendors by April 2022 in order to fulfill the department’s “urgent, unmet need” for an enterprise cloud capability, he said. The department also plans to do market research into other U.S. cloud giants.
