President Trump demands information on JEDI cloud contract: report – Business Insider

Thanks! Share it with your friends!

Close

President Donald Trump has demanded more information about a $10 billion cloud contract from the Pentagon that will be awarded to either Microsoft or Amazon, Bloomberg reported.

Trump did not say whether he would take the unprecedented move of intervening and blocking the contract from being awarded to either Microsoft or Amazon, the two remaining companies in the race, according to Bloomberg. However, Bloomberg cited a person familiar with a call between Trump and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida who said that it sounds like the president is thinking about canceling the deal.

This contract, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), is a winner-take-all contract to build a cloud infrastructure for the Department of Defense to hold sensitive military information. It could be worth as much as $10 billion over the next 10 years.

Google dropped out of the race in October, and IBM and Oracle got knocked out of the bid in April. Now, it’s down to Amazon and Microsoft — with Amazon and its market-leading Amazon Web Services platform widely expected to win.

Bloomberg reported that Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote a letter to the Pentagon expressing concerns over the contract and spoke with Trump about the matter. Rubio, meanwhile, went so far as to write a letter to national security adviser John Bolton, asking him to delay the awarding of the contract entirely over concerns that there wasn’t enough competition. Rubio spoke with Trump about his concerns, Bloomberg reported.

The letters in question expressed concerns that the terms of the JEDI deal made it so that some companies, including Oracle, could not win the bid. Trump asked his aides to show him these letters and expressed frustration that he didn’t know about these concerns earlier, according to Bloomberg.

Previously, Oracle filed a lawsuit challenging the Pentagon’s bidding process, saying that “JEDI is riddled with improprieties,” and “[Amazon Web Services] made undisclosed employment and bonus offers to at least two DoD (Dept. of Defense) JEDI officials.”

In June, the Pentagon denied these legal allegations and defended its decision to narrow down the race to Microsoft and Amazon.

“Oracle is not in the same class as Microsoft and AWS when it comes to providing commercial IaaS and PaaS cloud services on a broad scale,” the filing said, referring to two key cloud technology offerings — “infrastructure as a service” and “platform as a service.”

On July 12, a federal judge ruled against Oracle’s protest about the bid process favoring AWS. Court of Federal Claims Judge Eric Bruggink rejected Oracle’s arguments, saying “individual conflicts of interest did not impact the procurement.”

In April, Bloomberg reported Trump dined with Oracle CEO Safra Catz, who was part of his presidential transition team in 2016, during a time when Oracle was still in the JEDI race. The White House did not disclose what was discussed at the meeting, although Trump has been openly critical of Amazon. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post, which has published news coverage critical of Trump and his administration.

Oracle and Microsoft declined to comment. Business Insider has reached out to the Department of Defense, the White House, and Amazon for comment, and will update this story if we hear back.

Source Article from https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-jedi-cloud-contract-pentagon-amazon-microsoft-2019-7

Comments

Write a comment