Amazon and Microsoft shortlisted for Pentagon's $10bn cloud contract

Oracle and IBM elbowed out of JEDI defence cloud contract

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure have been short-listed for the Pentagon's $10 billion cloud computing contract, with Oracle and IBM edged out.

According to US Department of Defense spokesperson Elissa Smith, only Microsoft and Amazon met "the minimum requirements" for the contract, known as the joint enterprise defense infrastructure, or JEDI. The winner will be announced in July at the earliest, according to Smith.

While Amazon and Microsoft already enjoy the highest level of security clearance for government contracts in the US, the Department of Defense concluded that neither IBM nor Oracle met the program's minimum requirements.

The JEDI contract has been dogged by suggestions that offering just one large monolithic contract to handle all of the US Department of Defense's cloud needs is illegal, and claims of a conflict of interest in the procurement process.

Oracle has suggested that Deap Ubhi, the founder and CEO of a company called TableHero, who worked for AWS both before and after a stint at the Defense Digital Service, played a "personal and substantial" role in putting together the requirements for the JEDI contract.

Oracle claimed that talks over a partnership between his company and Amazon in October 2017 represented a clear conflict of interest, although Ubhi recused himself from the procurement at an early stage and resigned from the Defense Digital Service two weeks later.

Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz also lobbied President Trump directly over the contract procurement process, although there it does not appear as if Trump intervened.

And, last year, Representatives Tom Cole and Steve Womack sent a letter to the Department claiming that the requirements for the JEDI program "seem to be tailored to one specific contractor" - that contractor being AWS.

However, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has rejected the claims, arguing that the monolithic contract is "consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government's best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns".

Google had also thrown its hat into the ring for the JEDI contract, but withdrew in October 2018 following protests from staff, claiming that such a contract with the US Department of Defense contradicted its corporate values.

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