After months of speculation, intrigue, lawsuits, and presidential leaning, Microsoft has won the Pentagon’s $10 billion “JEDI” cloud storage contract, upsetting the presumed frontrunner Amazon.
The outcome comes as a surprise to many observers who described Amazon as the almost-certain winner of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, program. Amazon was considered by many to be the only qualified bidder because it had the largest enterprise cloud infrastructure and already had reached the necessary highest security level, known as Impact Level 6.
It was also a controversial pick. Several competitors, led by Oracle, protested the Pentagon’s original requirements for the program, arguing that the rules favored Amazon unfairly over other, smaller providers. They even took their concerns directly to President Donald Trump, who has a well-known dislike for Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO. Trump in July publicly began to question the competition and Defense Secretary Mark Esper began a review of the entire program. At one point, Trump told former Defense Secretary James Mattis to “screw” Amazon, according to a new book by a member of Mattis’s staff. Just days ago, Esper unexpectedly announced he was recusing himself from the award decision because his son worked as a digital strategy consultant for IBM, one of the original companies that bid, and was eliminated from the competition.
In a statement, AWS expressed surprise at the announcement. AWS is currently the only cl ..
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