Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explains why Microsoft won the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract

Back in October 2019, the US Department of Defense announced that Microsoft has been awarded with Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract with a ceiling value of $10,000,000,000 over a period of 10 years, if all options are exercised. Most people in the industry were really surprised by this announcement as most of them were expecting Amazon to win the JEDI contract. As expected, Amazon was not happy with DoD’s decision and it was planning to file a lawsuit against DoD’s decision. Today, we reported that Amazon is going to federal court to temporarily block Microsoft from working on JEDI contract.

Speaking to the press at an event in NYC yesterday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella explained why Microsoft won the $10 billion JEDI contract. According to Satya, Azure’s leadership in hybrid platform capabilities was the reason it won against Amazon.

“If you sort of even go back to the JEDI contract, that’s kind of what happened really,” Nadella said, “We stayed and said ‘Look, somebody like the Department of Defense is going to need forward deployment that is not going to be like, ‘Oh, here’s the cloud.” We just built basically a leadership position in what people describe as hybrid computing.”

“We are the only guys today who have the ability to distribute computation, dispute data and then have consistency of management, security and data across those two plates,” Nadella added.

He also pointed out that hybrid platform capabilities that are available today in Azure are the result of a decade-long effort. He mentioned that you can’t build a cloud with one architecture and later decide to add hybrid capabilities to make edge consistent.

Organizations can have many applications often running on different hardware across on-premises datacenters, multiple clouds, and the edge. Unlike AWS, Azure uniquely provides the flexibility for organizations to innovate anywhere in your hybrid environment while operating seamlessly and securely.

Regarding Amazon’s complaint in the court against DoD regarding JEDI contract, Microsoft provided the following statement.

“We believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft.”

via: BusinessInsider