As far as the Pentagon is concerned, there will be no Return of the Jedi.
Following a star wars of epic proportions involving Microsoft and Amazon, the US Department of Defense (DoD) on Tuesday decided to scrap Jedi, the USD10 billion cloud computing contract.
The Jedi, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, got mired into legal and political controversy. While Microsoft was awarded the contract in 2019, Amazon Web Services contended that the then President Donald Trump had influenced the decision because he had personal issues with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the reporting being done by the Bezos-owned Washington Post.
Pentagon said the $10bn contract no longer met its current needs due to the “shifting technology environment”.
In a statement, the DoD said: “With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the Jedi Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps.”
John Sherman, acting DoD Chief Information Officer, said it wasn’t necessarily because of the legal challenges that the contract was being scrapped.
“Jedi was developed at a time when the Department’s needs were different and both the CSPs technology and our cloud conversancy was less mature. In light of new initiatives like JADC2 (Joint All Domain Command and Control) and AI and Data Acceleration (ADA), the evolution of the cloud ecosystem within DoD, and changes in user requirements to leverage multiple cloud environments to execute mission, our landscape has advanced and a new way-ahead is warranted to achieve dominance in both traditional and non-traditional warfighting domains,” said Sherman.
However, the DoD announced its intent for new cloud efforts, and said both Microsoft and Amazon Web Service will be invited to bid again.
In a statement, the DoD added: “The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) will be a multi-cloud/multi-vendor Indefinite Delivery-Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract. The Department intends to seek proposals from a limited number of sources, namely the Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), as available market research indicates that these two vendors are the only Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) capable of meeting the Department’s requirements.”
In a blog post, Microsoft said it understands the Pentagon’s decision to cancel the JEDI contract.
“The 20 months since DoD selected Microsoft as its Jedi partner highlights issues that warrant the attention of policymakers: when one company can delay, for years, critical technology upgrades for those who defend our nation, the protest process needs reform,” Toni Townes-Whitley, president of US regulated industries at Microsoft, wrote.
“The decision doesn’t change the fact that not once, but twice, after careful review by professional procurement staff, the DoD decided that Microsoft and our technology best met their needs. It doesn’t change the DoD Inspector General’s finding that there was no evidence of interference in the procurement process. And it doesn’t change the fact that the DoD and other federal agencies – indeed, large enterprises worldwide – select Microsoft to support their cloud computing and digital transformation needs on a regular basis.”
In a short statement, AWS said: “We understand and agree with the DoD’s decision. Unfortunately, the contract award was not based on the merits of the proposals and instead was the result of outside influence that has no place in government procurement.”
