JEDI saga continues
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A federal judge is giving the Defense Department until Aug. 17 to accept proposal revisions addressing storage pricing, effectively extending a nearly three-year-long drama over the potential $10 billion enterprise cloud contract.
The Defense Department can proceed with its re-evaluation of certain aspects of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract.
Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith is giving DOD until Aug. 17 to accept proposal revisions addressing pricing for highly accessible data storage, effectively putting Amazon Web Services’ lawsuit against DOD on hold and extending a nearly three-year-long drama over a potential $10 billion enterprise cloud contract.
Awarded to Microsoft in October 2019, the JEDI project halted in February, when the judge granted an injunction sought by AWS on grounds that DOD made an error in the technical evaluation of bids and specifically in both companies’ cloud storage offerings.
The department subsequently proposed a remand for a corrective action to address that issue and accept limited proposal revisions including new price scenarios. AWS argued that DOD’s remand did not take into account the issues it was raising and said it would merely give Microsoft a “do-over.”
DOD also sought to re-evaluate the online marketplace offerings of both companies with the potential to clarify them. It is unknown how wide a scope DOD is taking, given the ruling is sealed.
For its part, Microsoft hit back after DOD’s inspector general released a report April 15 on its nearly year-long investigation into the program and largely found the department followed the law in how it carried out the procurement.
Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Jon Palmer wrote in a blog post that AWS is the one seeking a “do-over” on JEDI and simply bid too high a price in its proposal.
In a statement last month, Microsoft said it supported DOD’s move to reconsider certain aspects of the award decision as it is “likely the fastest way to resolve all issues” and move ahead on the JEDI program.
This article was first posted to Washington Technology, a sibling site to GCN.