Microsoft has beaten Amazon in the $10bn competition to provide Cloud services to the US Department of Defense (DoD).
Pentagon has awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud contract to Microsoft to migrate its computing infrastructure and data to the Cloud.
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The indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract calls for the provision of enterprise-level commercial infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) in support of DoD operations.
The JEDI enterprise general-purpose Cloud contract could be worth as much as $10bn over ten years if all options are exercised.
In a press statement, the DoD said: “This continues our strategy of a multi-vendor, multi-Cloud environment as the department’s needs are diverse and cannot be met by any single supplier.
“This contract will address critical and urgent unmet warfighter requirements for modern Cloud infrastructure at all three classification levels delivered out to the tactical edge.”
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By GlobalDataThe contract award to Microsoft comes nearly two years after the DoD issued the first RFI for the contract to industry.
Amazon, IBM and Oracle were among the other companies in the initial process. The long-drawn competition saw IBM and Oracle eliminated, leaving Amazon and Microsoft as the only two firms in the running for the contract.
Amazon was seen as a frontrunner in the competition. However, protests from other companies about the contract process caused further delays in the process.
US President Donald Trump expressed concerns about the process and pressed into service Defense Secretary Mark Esper to look into the JEDI project, who later recused himself citing his son’s employment with IBM.
DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said: “The National Defense Strategy dictates that we must improve the speed and effectiveness with which we develop and deploy modernised technical capabilities to our women and men in uniform.
“The DOD Digital Modernization Strategy was created to support this imperative. This award is an important step in execution of the Digital Modernization Strategy.”
