Amazon cites bias in Microsoft's military cloud contract gain
Jeff Bezos speaks at the New York Economic Club lunchtime in New York on October 27, 2016.
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Amazon said Thursday that it has filed a notice in the US federal court that indicated a plan to protest Pentagon's decision to award Microsoft a controversial cloud computing service contract.
The contract can last for 10 years and is worth up to $ 10 billion. The Wall Street Journal previously reported on Amazon's plans.
The contract is a big win for Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella, who has made cloud services a higher priority. For Amazon, it would be less; The Amazon Web Services division generated sales of $ 9 billion in the last quarter.
"Numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear flaws, errors and unmistakable bias ̵[ads1]1; and it is important that these issues were investigated and rectified," Amazon told CNBC in an email.
A Pentagon official said it would not speculate on potential litigation. Microsoft did not immediately respond to comment requests.
In August, the Pentagon announced that Esper would go through the JEDI agreement after President Donald Trump said he had received complaints from companies about the process. Trump said in July that companies communicated that the specifications of the contract favored Amazon, according to Bloomberg.
"I've never had anything where multiple complaints," Trump said last month in the White House. "Some of the biggest companies in the world are complaining about that," he added, calling Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.
The lucrative contract, which was originally to be awarded in September 2018, was postponed to Defense Minister Mark Esper completed a series of thorough reviews of the technology.
"We have to make this happen so we are not in a hurry to make a decision. We are going to spend all the time the evaluation team needs to spend to make sure we choose the best technical solution at the right price with the right one the criteria, "Pentagon's communications director Dana Deasy told reporters in a closed-door media queen at the Pentagon.
"Deasy added." We have a bunch of bizarre solutions we built. We have many suppliers that we use for cloud solutions, but we have never withdrawn and created a comprehensive solution, and that creates challenges in the field. "[19659002] – CNBC's Ylan Mui contributed to this report.
SE: President Trump: We'll take a closer look at the Amazon contract with the Pentagon
