Pentagon cancels $10 billion JEDI cloud contract that Amazon and Microsoft were fighting over

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: CNBC

The Department of Defense announced Tuesday it’s calling off the $10 billion cloud contract that was the subject of a legal battle involving Amazon and Microsoft. The JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, deal has become one of the most tangled contracts for the Department of Defense. In a press release Tuesday, the Pentagon said that “due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs.”

But the fight over a cloud computing project does not appear to be completely over yet. The Pentagon said in the press release that it still needs enterprise-scale cloud capability and announced a new multi-vendor contract known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. The agency said it plans to solicit proposals from both Amazon and Microsoft for the contract, adding that they are the only cloud service providers that can meet its needs. But, it added, it will continue to do market research to see if others could also meet its specifications.

Amazon and Microsoft did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment. Shares of Microsoft dipped slightly on the news and Amazon shares barely moved. The lucrative JEDI contract was intended to modernize the Pentagon’s IT operations for services rendered over as many as 10 years. Microsoft was awarded the cloud computing contract in 2019, beating out market leader Amazon Web Services. A month later, Amazon’s cloud computing unit filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims protesting the JEDI decision.

The company argued that President Donald Trump’s bias against Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, influenced the Pentagon to give the contract to Microsoft. Last year, the Pentagon’s inspector general released a report saying that the award did not appear to be influenced by the White House. However, the inspector general noted in the 313-page report published in April 2020, that it had limited cooperation from White House officials throughout its review and, as a result, it could not complete its assessment of allegations of ethical misconduct.

Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/06/pentagon-cancels-10-billion-jedi-cloud-contract.html

[TheBlackAdder]

1. JEDI -- Isn't that a collective that was almost made extinct? Not the swiftest of acronym use.

[Polybius]

4. Well Darth Vader almost made the Jedi extinct

But The Force was strong in them, and he failed in the end.

[Sapient Donkey]

2. They should just hire me to install OpenStack on a few servers

I'll do it for a fraction of the cost at only $1 billion dollars.

[reACTIONary]

6. +10 nt

[thesquanderer]

3. re: "Amazon and Microsoft...are the only cloud service providers that can meet its needs."

Interesting that Google can't. I wonder if it has anything to do with this part of the article:

The DoD said its cloud vendor for the new contract will have to meet several criteria, like working on all three classification levels (i.e. unclassified, secret or top secret), be available around the world and have top tier cybersecurity controls.

[zipplewrath]

5. confidential

I'm always concerned when an article gets the details wrong. The three levels are confidential, secret, and top secret.

[ancianita]

7. How can ANY cloud service provider meet those classification levels, is the question.

Only a cloud service used by the 5 Eyes that's never been compromised seems like the Pentagon's best option.
Google China was doing all kinds of cloud service there, not to mention AI research, and it's understandable that the Pentagon might have issues with Google Corps related to anything China.

[IronLionZion]

8. More cancel culture from out of control liberals

[peppertree]

9. May the Farce be with them

[jmowreader]

10. What part of...

“Buy 20 mainframes, put five at Fort Meade, five at Fort Lewis, five at Mishawaka AB, Japan and five in Kaiserslautern, Germany, link them with off-the-shelf cloud apps and create a new low-density MOS to operate them” isn’t doable?

[BumRushDaShow]

11. The government has been getting rid of their datacenters

and basically "outsourcing" the data storage to 3rd party, high-availability/high-throughput cloud providers... They don't want to pay for homegrown operations staff anymore (outside of COTRs), nor for the contractors to maintain their own hardware at their datacenters, plus have to also deal with necessary redundancy... And don't let some random utility company's street dig have an "accidental cut" in a fiber that results in your datacenter being dead in the water. They would rather have AW$ or M$ deal with those pesky details.