Pentagon cancels $ 10 billion JEDI Cloud Contract; Amazon, Microsoft are finalists: NPR
Defense Secretary Mark Esper estimates a cloud computing contract worth up to $ 10 billion, the Pentagon said Thursday.
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Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper estimates a cloud computing contract worth up to $ 10 billion, the Pentagon said Thursday.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
The Pentagon breaks a massive, first-rate cloud computing contract after President Trump cited critics' accusations of favoritism against Amazon.
Mark Esper, the new Secretary of Defense, is reviewing the project just weeks before the winner was expected to be announced. Amazon and Microsoft are the contract's finalists worth up to $ 10 billion over a decade. The project is called JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure.
"No decision will be made on the program until he has completed the investigation," Defense Department spokeswoman Elissa Smith said Thursday.
The new poll is good news for Oracle and IBM, which have been knocked out of the bidding competition and unsuccessfully sued to block the award.
They and some Republicans in Congress Sen. has argued that the Ministry of Defense should choose several companies instead of a single winner. Critics have also accused the Pentagon and Amazon of having an unfairly cozy relationship, pointing to several Department of Defense employees who have done work for Amazon's cloud business AWS.
The Department of Defense, the Government Accountability Office and the Court of Federal Claims have gone through the JEDI bidding process and allowed the contract to continue. The Pentagon has also argued that the criticism was "ill-informed" and "manipulative."
But these complaints have reached the ear of President Trump, who has publicly expressed contempt to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos over Amazon's agreement with the United States Postal Service and Bezos's personal ownership of The Washington Post, whose news coverage is a regular targets for Trump's criticism.
"I get huge complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon, they say it was not & # 39; I asked them to look into it to see what is happening, because I have had very few things there has been so complained. "
Congressional letters have also flowed in recent weeks from Republicans who believe the JEDI contract is occupied – and Republicans who argue for the delays in allocating it have already hurt Pentagon's pressing technology needs.
Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle declined to comment on the re-examination of the cloud contract. Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are among NPR's financial backers.
"JEDI is probably the most important cloud deal ever," said Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives. "This is the Pentagon moving to the cloud, and any company that gets it – it will have a massive ripple effect for decades to come."
