Amazon Claims Pentagon Got Almost Everything Wrong in JEDI Evaluation

Amazon Claims Pentagon Got Almost Everything Wrong in JEDI Evaluation

In court documents unsealed Monday, Amazon alleges the Pentagon made “numerous and compounding prejudicial errors” in awarding its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft.


Amazon’s redacted complaint—scrubbed for proprietary information but more than 100 pages in length—positions its bid as technically superior and more secure than Microsoft’s in almost every measure. The company is challenging the Defense Department’s award of the contract—worth up to $10 billion over up to a decade—to Microsoft in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.  


“Any meaningful review of that decision reveals egregious errors on nearly every evaluation factor, from ignoring the unique strengths of AWS's proposal, to overlooking clear failures in Microsoft's proposal to meet JEDI's technical requirements, to deviating altogether from [the Defense Department’s] own evaluation criteria to give a false sense of parity between the two offerors,” the complaint states. “These fundamental errors alone require reversal.”


The JEDI contract aims to provide the Defense Department and military branches with a global commercial cloud computing infrastructure to host, process, analyze and store vast amounts of classified and sensitive data. Amazon’s complaint gets into the weeds of the highly technical procurement and how it says the Pentagon erred in evaluating several key factors, including security, management, classified infrastructure, cost, tactical edge and management.


In one example, Amazon said the Pentagon changed its selection approach of the procurement in spring 2019 after both companies had submitted their bids. The Pentagon had already confirmed Amazon’s bid—which planned to use existing data centers currently in use by the Defense Department and intelligence community for JEDI—as “realistic and feasible,” according to the complaint.


“And at the eleventh hour—months after DoD completed its evaluation of A ..

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