The heated battle between Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was centered on a 10-year, $10-billion government cloud contract, is over before it even began.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), announced Tuesday that it was cancelling the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract (JEDI). The Department stated in a statement that it had determined that the JEDI Cloud contract does not meet its needs due to changing requirements, increased cloud conversancy, industry advances, and other factors.
Instead, the DoD announced that it is seeking proposals for a new project, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), which will be a “multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract.”
According to the DoD, the JEDI contract was to provide the Pentagon with “enterprise-level, commercial Infrastructure as a Service IaaS and Platform as a Service PaaS to support Department of Defense business operations and mission operations.” The DoD awarded the contract in late 2019 to Microsoft after receiving bids from major cloud providers. This was a surprise to many industry observers who thought Microsoft’s Azure platform was a weaker competitor to AWS.
Amazon filed a legal challenge almost immediately to Microsoft’s win, citing technical differences in Microsoft’s storage solution and the requirements outlined in the procurement process. According to Amazon, the DoD “should’ve found [Microsoft] technical approach infeasible”, assigned a deficiency and eliminated Microsoft from competition.”
Amazon also claimed that former US president Donald Trump pressured the DoD to drop AWS due to his long-running feud with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (who also owns The Washington Post). According to Amazon’s complaint, Trump launched repeated public and hidden attacks to steer AWS away from AWS in order to harm his perceived political enemy-Jeffrey P. Bezos.”
A judge issued an injunction prohibiting work on the JEDI contract during the court case. The DoD requested a 120-day grace period, which was later extended to allow it to “reconsider” its process of judging the Microsoft and AWS proposals.
An internal investigation determined that the DoD’s contract-award process was sound. In September 2020, Microsoft was “reaffirmed” as the correct winner. The DoD announced Tuesday that JEDI’s legal problems had made its technical goals obsolete.
John Sherman, acting DoD Chief information Officer, stated that JEDI was created at a time when Department’s needs were different. Also, both the CSPs (cloud service providers) technology and our cloud conversancy were less mature. “In light of new initiatives…the evolution in the cloud ecosystem within DoD and changes in user requirements for multiple cloud environments to carry out mission, our landscape is changing and a new way to go is warranted in order to gain dominance in both traditional warfighting domains and non-traditional.
Microsoft stated in a statement that it “respect[s] the decision of DoD to move forward on another path to secure mission critical technology.” It also blamed Amazon for delaying JEDI work:
The 20-month period since DoD selected Microsoft to be its JEDI partner highlights important issues that should be brought to the attention of policymakers. When one company can delay for years critical technology upgrades for our nation’s defense, then the protest process must be reformed. Amazon filed its protest in November 2019. It was expected that the case would take at least one year to litigate and result in a decision. There may be appeals.
Update 7/7: An AWS spokesperson sent an e-mailed message to clarify the situation.
