Oracle renews JEDI fight
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Oracle is pushing ahead with its lawsuit against the Department of Defense over the 10-year, $10 billion cloud procurement known as JEDI.
Continuing its battle against the Department of Defense over the 10-year, $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure solicitation, Oracle filed a supplemental complaint in its ongoing protest of the JEDI cloud procurement.
The lawsuit had been paused while DOD conducted an internal investigation of several employees with ties to Amazon Web Services who were alleged to have improperly influenced the development of JEDI requirements. DOD concluded that there may have been ethical violations, but overall there was "no adverse impact on the integrity of the acquisition process."
Oracle did not agree with the findings of the DOD investigation, and its filing stated that the terms of the solicitation violate the law. Oracle characterized the violations as "a web of lies, ethics violations, and misconduct," which include hidden job offers and promised bonus payments to officials.
"Oracle believes and asserts that [conflicts of interest] impacted each allegation of this protest, but whether the challenged criteria resulted from procurement misconduct or legal error ultimately does not matter," because the JEDI specifications under protest violated the Federal Acquisition Regulation and procurement law, the filing stated.
Oracle updated its complaint to protest its exclusion, along with IBM, from the second round of the JEDI procurement. After a competitive range, the field was winnowed down to two bidders: AWS and Microsoft.
The company renewed its objections to JEDI's single-award structure because it said it conflicts with procurement law, arguing that pursing a single-award indefinite quantity/indefinite delivery model is not supported by the way cloud is typically deployed by large enterprises. Additionally, Oracle took issue with several specific requirements with regard to security and size as well as the requirement that the winning bidder be able to furnish DOD with a marketplace for add-on applications.
This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to GCN.
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