Amazon enraged as DoD stands by Microsoft JEDI decision

“Nothing more than an attempt to validate a flawed, biased and politically corrupt decision”

The US Department of Defence (DoD) has reaffirmed its decision to award Microsoft with a major military cloud contract in the latest blow to Amazon’s attempts to overturn the award.

In March, the DoD said it would launch a reevaluation of its decision to address Amazon’s claims the JEDI award was based on politics instead of the merit of the respective cloud provider’s proposals.

After reevaluating Amazon’s and Microsoft’s proposals the DoD said Microsoft still offered the ‘best value’ for the US Government, prompting Amazon to publish a lengthy online invective in which it doubled down on previous allegations of political bias.

Microsoft secured the $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) with the US Department of Defense in October 2019 but the project is currently on hold while Amazon contests the decision in court.

“The DoD’s re-evaluation [is] nothing more than an attempt to validate a flawed, biased, and politically corrupted decision,” wrote Amazon, which alleges that President Trump personally interfered in the JEDI procurement process to steer the award away from AWS. Amazon used the blog post to echo reports that the President ordered former Secretary James Mattis to “screw’” Amazon.

“AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and by any objective measure, has superior technology. For ten consecutive years, AWS has been named the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service. AWS has more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider—by a large amount,” it continued.

“AWS provides a more secure and more operationally performant offering, and remains the only cloud provider accredited to support the full range of U.S. government data classifications. We welcome competition, but any objective, apples-to-apples assessment based purely on the offerings, clearly leads to a different conclusion than the DoD made.”

Amazon also contested the DoD’s claim that Microsoft offered the military more value for money: “It’s also important to point out that the DoD cited price as a major factor in the previous decision. This time, AWS offered a lower cost by several tens of millions of dollars. The DoD’s decision to intentionally ignore the clear cost benefits offered by AWS reinforces the fact that this corrective action was never meant to be fair.”

Amazon added that it planned to present new evidence that supports its defence when the parties next convene in court.