AWS renews JEDI protest — FCW

Cloud

AWS renews JEDI protest

• By Adam Mazmanian
• Dec 16, 2020

 

Amazon Internet Providers resumed its authorized battle over the 10-year, $10 billion enterprise cloud contract generally known as JEDI months after the Pentagon re-awarded the contract to Microsoft.

In accordance with an up to date lawsuit filed within the Courtroom of Federal Claims, AWS emerged because the low bidder by tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in revised proposals submitted to the Division of Protection below a corrective motion that came about whereas the case was on remand.

“AWS’s emergence because the lowest priced offeror difficult DOD’s efforts to steer the contract to Microsoft,” the lawsuit states. The re-award to Microsoft was made, based on AWS, regardless of Microsoft’s poor efficiency on exams associated to capability and safety and displays the long-standing animus of President Donald Trump towards Jeff Bezos, founding father of AWS mother or father firm Amazon.

The revised criticism is dated Oct. 23 and was launched with redactions on Dec. 15. DOD publicly introduced the re-award to Microsoft on Sept. 4. The contract was initially awarded to Microsoft in October, 2019. The request for proposals was launched in the summertime of 2018 and the construction of the single-award enterprise cloud contract was developed the yr earlier than that.

“[T]hese errors didn’t happen in a vacuum,” the lawsuit states. “As an alternative they are often finest defined as the most recent manifestation of President Trump’s willpower to steer the [Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure] contract away from AWS.”

AWS is in search of aid on 4 counts: a failure to judge proposals by the phrases of the solicitation; disparate therapy that favored Microsoft’s bid over that of AWS; an “irrational” finest worth choice; and claims of “bias, dangerous religion, improper affect, and/or battle of curiosity.”

On this final rating, AWS claims there’s a report of JEDI procurement officers assembly with senior White Home officers to debate this system, and {that a} deliberate investigation of those contacts by the DOD Workplace of Inspector Basic was obstructed. A subsequent OIG report was inconclusive on the character of those interactions.

AWS is asking the courtroom to proceed an order to halt work on the contract, declare the re-award choice to be outdoors the bounds of the regulation, order DOD to reevaluate current proposal or solicit revised bids. Moreover, AWS needs DOD to switch the supply choice crew on the JEDI contract and grant AWS prices incurred in modifying its proposals for DOD.

“We had made clear that until the DoD addressed the entire defects in its preliminary choice, we might proceed to pursue a good and goal evaluation, and that’s precisely the place we discover ourselves immediately,” an AWS spokesperson stated in an emailed assertion.

Microsoft pressured the deserves of DOD’s choices of their response. “Because the dropping bidder, Amazon was knowledgeable of our pricing and so they realized they’d initially bid too excessive,” Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s company vice chairman for communications, stated in an emailed assertion. “They then amended facets of their bid to attain a cheaper price. Nevertheless, when taking a look at all the standards collectively, the profession procurement officers on the DoD determined that given the superior technical benefits and general worth, we continued to supply one of the best resolution. We additionally know what it takes to serve the DoD having labored with them for greater than 40 years.”