After years of fighting and battling the world’s largest cloud infrastructure companies, the Pentagon is finally pulling the plug based on today’s controversial winner-take-all, $10 billion JDI deal. In the end no one won. “With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JDI Cloud Agreement, which has been long overdue, no longer meets the requirements to fill DOD’s capacity gap,” a Pentagon spokesman said.
The contract procurement process began in 2018 with a call for RFPs for F-$10 billion, decade-long contracts to manage the cloud infrastructure strategy for the Pentagon. Pentagon spokeswoman Heather Bob told TechCrunch why they were going with them. Single-winner approach:
“Single rewards are advantageous because, among other things, it improves security, improves data accessibility and makes it easier for departments to receive and use cloud services,” he said at the time. Although from the beginning, companies objected to the single-winner approach, believing that the Pentagon would be better served with a multi-vendor approach. Some companies, especially Oracle, believed that the purchase process was designed to support Amazon.
In the end it came down to a pair of finalists – Amazon and Microsoft – and in the end Microsoft won. Amazon, however, believed it had advanced technology and lost the deal only because of the direct intervention of the previous president, who was disrespected by then-CEO Jeff Bezos (who also owned the Washington Post). Amazon decided to fight the decision in court, and after months of delays, the Pentagon decided it was time to move on. In a blog post, Microsoft took a swipe at Amazon to reduce delays.
“20 months after the election of Microsoft as a partner of DOD JIDI, policy makers need to pay attention: when an organization can delay critical technology upgrades for years to protect our country, the protest process needs to be reformed. Amazon protested in November 2012, and it was expected that it would take at least another year to sue and decide after a possible appeal, “Microsoft wrote in a blog post about the termination of the agreement. However, in its own statement, Amazon restored the belief that the process had not worked smoothly. “We understand and agree with DOD’s decision.
