Pentagon hands Microsoft $10B ‘war cloud’ deal, snubs Amazon

The Pentagon signed a $ 10 billion cloud computing deal with Microsoft to defeat Amazon, an early leader who was criticized by President Donald Trump and business competitors.

Bidding on this large project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), allowed major technologies, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and IBM to compete with each other.

The huge contract caught most attention than Amazon was ignited by speculation early in the process to be the only winner of the contract. Technology giants Oracle and IBM canceled their own bids and officially protested the bidding process last year.

Oracle later challenged federal court proceedings, but lost.

President Trump said in July that the government would "look very long" at hearing complaints. Trump often expressed his beliefs about Amazon, who owned the Washington Post, and founder Jeff Bezos. At the time, he told other companies that the contract was "not competitively bidding."

Defense Minister Mark Esper withdrew himself in the controversial bidding process earlier this week. A conflict of interest occurred because his son worked for one of the companies that originally bid.

The JEDI system stores and processes vast amounts of classified data, allowing US troops to use artificial intelligence to accelerate their war planning and combat capabilities.

The cloud strategy document released last year by the Department of Defense replaced the military's "separate stove information system" with a commercial cloud service, calling for "commercial cloud services critical to providing data to fighters and maintaining the military's technical advantages."

The Pentagon stressed in its announcement that the process is fair and follows procurement guidelines. In the past two years, more than $ 11 billion has been awarded in 10 individual cloud computing contracts, and the JEDI Award says, "We are continuing our strategy for multi-vendor, multi-cloud environments."

The latter statement seems to have been designed to address previous criticisms of granting such a big deal to a company.

This is a major win for Microsoft Cloud Business Azure, which has long followed Amazon's industry-leading Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft said it is preparing a statement.

Amazon said Friday was surprised by the decision.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said, "AWS is a definite leader in cloud computing, and a detailed evaluation of the comparative product clearly leads to different conclusions." "We continue to innovate on a new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure."

According to a July report by research firm Gartner, Amazon holds nearly 48{7be40b84a6a43fc4fae13304fce9a2695859798abfc41afd127b9f8b21c5f9c5} of the public cloud computing market, with second place Microsoft at nearly 16{7be40b84a6a43fc4fae13304fce9a2695859798abfc41afd127b9f8b21c5f9c5}.

Last year, Microsoft became a friend of the US military. Brad Smith wrote last fall that Microsoft has been providing technology to the military for a long time and will continue to do so despite staff backlash.

Oracle and IBM were removed early in the process, and Microsoft and Amazon eventually struggled with him.

Google decided not to compete in the agreement last year, which would conflict with the AI ​​ethical principles.

Googlers protested against protests from government contracting companies in particular.

Dan Ives, Managing Director of Wedbush Securities, said, “Microsoft is a former patient of the paradigm of beating JEDI. "Amazon and Bezos are big black eyes."

Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and other technology giants have been criticized by their employees for conducting business in government, particularly military and immigration related projects.

Source: AP