Pentagon still wants to give $ 10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft

After a reconsideration, the US Department of Defense says it is still giving the multi-billion dollar cloud services contract to Microsoft. The tender was reconsidered following a lawsuit filed by competitor Amazon.

In a brief announcement on Friday, the Department of Defense states that “Microsoft’s offering still represents the most bang for the buck from the government.” Due to the court order that emerged from the Amazon case, the tender has been postponed to February 13.

Amazon maintains its position that the bid to Microsoft is politically motivated. Amazon head Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, a news medium that President Donald Trump is not positive about. In response to the decision, Amazon said it believes it should ask itself “whether it is acceptable for the president to use the Defense budget to achieve his personal and political ends.” Amazon deems the AWS offering to be ‘relatively stronger’ and continues to ‘pursue a fair, objective and unbiased review’.

It concerns a contract worth ten billion dollars to provide Defense with cloud services for ten years. The so-called Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud project or JEDI is intended to give the army better access to data from, for example, battlefields or in other areas.