Amazon makes good on promise to sue Pentagon on JEDI contract bias
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Amazon has not been too happy about losing the Pentagon’s massive $10 billion JEDI contract to Microsoft and now Reuters report that the company has made good on their threat to sue the Pentagon regarding this.
Amazon filed the case at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims under seal, saying the filings contain “proprietary information, trade secrets, and confidential financial information” that could “cause either party severe competitive harm,” and therefore did not reveal the basis for the contesting the allocation of the contract.
The grounds for the Amazon JEDI lawsuit had not been revealed but earlier Amazon said that they were “uniquely experienced and qualified to provide the critical technology the US military needs” and that there were “numerous aspects of the JEDI evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors and unmistakable bias.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper rejected any impropriety and Microsoft agreed, saying:
“We believe the facts will show they (DoD) ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft,” Microsoft said in an emailed statement.
Originally there were four companies in the race which included IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon. The former two were eliminated at the later stage leaving Microsoft and Amazon, with some speculation that Amazon had the specification written specifically to suit their services.
Due to this allegation, the Pentagon had in fact already completed an internal investigation in potential ethics concerns around the contract, including the development of requirements and the request for proposal process.
At the time the Pentagon investigated whether current or former Pentagon officials committed misconduct relating to the JEDI acquisition, such as whether any had any conflicts of interest related to their involvement in the acquisition process.
The contract is especially important since there are speculations that other departments will follow the Pentagon’s footsteps and upgrade their infrastructures in the future.
