INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Amazon has filed a lawsuit in federal US court contesting the US Defense Department's decision last month to award the $10bn Joint
Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to its cloud computing rival Microsoft.According to a spokesperson from AWS, the complaint
and supplemental motion for discovery were filed in the US Court of Federal Claims under seal
However, Amazon did not explain the basis for its complaint.In a court document seeking a protective order, Amazon explained that the
filings contain “proprietary information, trade secrets and confidential financial information” which have the potential to “cause
either party severe competitive harm”
The company also said that “the record in this bid protest likely will contain similarly sensitive information”.Suggestions of bias in
the Pentagon's decision to award Microsoft the $10bn JEDI contract were rejected by US Defense Secretary Mark Esper last week when Amazon
announced its plans to challenge the decision.For quite some time, Amazon was believed to be the favorite to win the JEDI contract after
IBM, Oracle and even Google dropped out of the bidding process
The e-commerce giant's cloud computing division AWS was the most likely to win the lucrative contract which is why Microsoft being awarded
it came as such a surprise.However, Amazon believes that politics got in the way of a fair bidding process as the company's CEO Jeff Bezos
has been an outspoken critic of President Trump
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the other hand, believes that staying out of politics played a big part in helping it win the Pentagon's
cloud computing contract.With $10bn on the line over ten years, it comes as no surprise that Amazon would try to appeal the Defense
Department's decision just as Oracle did when it filed a lawsuit earlier this year saying the contract favored a single cloud vendor.Via
