DOD's JEDI review too narrow, AWS says
Amazon Web Services wants the Defense Department to consider all the errors AWS identified in its protest when re-evaluating proposals for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract.
When the Pentagon decided to review last year’s award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft, Amazon Web Services got part of what it wanted.
In a new court filing submitted March 24, attorneys representing Amazon Web Services claimed that the Defense Department’s plan to review its award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract to Microsoft is insufficient to address its arguments and that DOD merely is giving Microsoft a “do-over” on its bid.
DOD’s motion to review the award asked Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith to let it accept limited proposal revisions from AWS and Microsoft that address their technical approaches to pricing scenarios and reconsider evaluations of both companies’ online marketplace offerings and possibly clarifications if need be. The judge has not ruled yet on whether she will let DOD proceed that way.
Attorneys representing AWS told the court that DOD should go beyond those narrow windows in any corrective action and re-evaluate proposals “with respect to all of the errors identified by the protest,” including the allegation that political interference by the Trump administration swung the award to Microsoft.
“The government should not be permitted to gerrymander the corrective action to preserve the illusion that Microsoft offered the lowest price while simultaneously perpetuating competitive impediments for AWS, the only offeror that submitted a compliant proposal eligible for award,” AWS’ legal team told the court.
An AWS spokesman said in a statement sent to reporters that while the company welcomes the move toward corrective action, it remains “concerned that the proposed approach is not designed to provide a complete, fair, and effective re-evaluation.”
While the JEDI award is in dispute, one certainty is that the contract will still go to a single winner despite some market speculation that DOD’s motion for a corrective action singled some willingness to divide the contract between AWS and Microsoft.
DOD spokesman Lt. Col. Robert Carver told Breaking Defense that the department “will not split the award, as the requirement remains for a single award and the solicitation calls for a single award.”
This article was first posted to Washington Technology, a sibling site to GCN.