Pentagon has confirmed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft have been selected to continue competing for cloud computing services contract that could be worth some $10 billion.
The U.S. Department of Defense did not select Oracle and IBM for the contract for building the Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud, or JEDI. The Cloud contract is part of a broad modernization of Pentagon information technology systems, Reuters reported.
The market share of leading vendors in the Cloud infrastructure market during Q4 2018 was 32.3 percent for AWS, 16.5 percent for Microsoft Azure, 9.5 percent for Google Cloud, 4.2 percent for Alibaba Cloud and 3.6 percent for IBM Cloud, Canalys report said.
“AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Microsoft are the companies that met the minimum requirements outlined” in the Request for Proposals, department spokeswoman Elissa Smith said in a statement.
The Pentagon said in its request for bidders last year that the contract for cloud computing services could be worth as much as $10 billion over a 10-year period.
Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle were considered front runners for the contract. AWS at the time was the only company approved by the government to handle secret and top secret data.
Elissa Smith said the earliest a contract was likely to be awarded was mid-July, mainly because of the size and complexity of the deal, potential protest litigation and an ongoing investigation.
Oracle has expressed concern about the role of a former Amazon employee who worked on the JEDI project until recusing himself, then later left the Defense Department and returned to Amazon Web Services.
Elissa Smith said a department review of the acquisitions process did uncover potential ethical violations, which have been referred to the Defense Department’s inspector general for further investigation.
But Elissa Smith said the investigation determined there were “no conflicts of interest that affected the integrity of the acquisition process.”
