As judge dismiss corruption claims $10 billion JEDI race enters home stretch

The competition between Amazon and Microsoft for the Department of Defense’s lucrative Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract is nearing its conclusion after a judge dismissed claims of inappropriate behaviour on the part of Amazon.

Oracle had earlier claimed that Amazon had attempted to influence the decision by offering well-paying Amazon positions to Defence Department contractors who wrote the specification after they completed their work at the DoD.

Eric Bruggink, the Washington DC Federal Judge for the Court of Federal Claims, dismissed the claim, stating:

“We conclude…the contracting officer’s findings that an organisational conflict of interest does not exist and that individual conflicts of interest did not impact the procurement were not arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

“Plaintiff’s motion for judgment on the administrative record is therefore denied. ”

The decision was originally expected in early July, and should therefore now be announced very soon.

Amazon’s AWS service was originally expected to be a shoo-in for the deal, which aims to replace the DoD’s dated platform with a commercial cloud service “that will empower the warfighter with data and is critical to maintaining our military’s technological advantage.” Microsoft has however offered strong competition by upgrading its certification and services and has been aggressively courting other government contracts, including a number of other high profile military contracts such as the $480 million IVAS HoloLens 2 contract  , a $1.76 billion Defense Department contract, and the $8 billion DEOS contract. 

Via Sputnik News