The US Department of Defense has canceled its disputed cloud services contract with Microsoft, citing changing needs in the military. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud project was awarded to Microsoft in 2019, but later contested in court by one of the other bidders, Amazon Web Services. The DoD said it will design a new tender and seek offers from both Microsoft and AWS.
According to a statement, "the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs". The development of the proposed infrastructure-as-a-cloud goes back to at least 2017, and Microsoft was awarded the multi-billion-dollar deal in October 2019. However, work on the ten-year contract was unable to start after Amazon obtained an injunction against the award, claiming it was discriminated against in the process.
Nevertheless, the DoD said it still has cloud needs, while industry services have also advanced. The new contract will be known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) and is expected to use multiple clouds and vendors under an open-ended framework in value.
The Department said it intends to seek proposals from a limited number of sources, namely Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, as "available market research indicates that these two vendors are the only Cloud Service Providers capable of meeting the Department’s requirements". However, additional research is planned to see if any other US-based hyperscale CSPs can also meet the DoD’s requirements. If so, the Department will also negotiate with those companies.
Microsoft said in a statement that it understood the DoD's decision to not await the outcome of what could be years of litigation settling Amazon's claims. The company underlined its previous success with department and said the preparations taken for the JEDI contract place it even better to win future business with the military.
