As the Department of Defense meanders along the path to awarding its ten-year $10 billion cloud computing contract next year, it will get some help defending its process from the front-runner for the deal.
Amazon Web Services has signed onto a new lawsuit filed by Oracle against the federal government as a defendant, according to Techcrunch. Oracle is attempting to argue that the bid process is unfair given its insistence that a single cloud provider will be awarded the full contract, an argument dismissed earlier this year by a federal agency that reviews procurement disputes.
Several companies are keenly interested in the JEDI deal, but only AWS and Microsoft are thought to have a chance of winning based on the single-vendor requirement. Google, the only other U.S.-based cloud provider with operations similar in scale and scope to those two companies, announced in October that it did not plan to compete for the gig after a tumultuous summer of employee revolt over cloud-based artificial-intelligence services it provided to the Pentagon under a separate deal.
Barring any revelations that emerge from the latest suit, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the Pentagon is expected to award the JEDI contract in early spring. An AWS representative declined to comment on the lawsuit.
