A federal judge granted Amazon’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the Pentagon from moving forward with work under its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract due to what the judge said was “quite likely” a material error in Microsoft’s bid overlooked by Pentagon officials.
While Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith issued the ruling for a temporary injunction Feb. 13, the court unsealed her lengthy and technical opinion Friday evening. The halt is another delay for the Defense Department’s purchase of a commercial enterprise cloud—a procurement that has already stretched more than two years due to lawmaker inquiries, bid protests and a legal challenge in federal court. Microsoft won the contract worth up to $10 billion in October. Amazon’s filed its lawsuit in November..
In the ruling, the judge said Amazon was likely to show that Microsoft offered a “noncompliant storage solution” to reduce the costs of its JEDI bid and that the Pentagon “erred” by not issuing a “deficiency” to Microsoft’s proposal. The judge concluded that Amazon’s “chances of receiving the award would have increased absent [the Pentagon’s] evaluation error.” The type of storage Microsoft’s proposed is redacted, but the judge said the JEDI procurement “explicitly required online storage,” which the company did not offer.
“In the context of a procurement for cloud computing services, the court considers it quite likely that this failure is material,” Campbell-Smith said. “As such, [Amazon] likely is correct that [the Defense Department] should have assigned a deficiency to [Microsoft’s] proposal.”
The court defines a deficiency as “a material failure of a proposal to meet a Government requirement or a combin ..
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