The Department of Defense has filed court documents indicating it is prepared to continuing fighting for its JEDI contract decision.
The industry was rocked when the DOD announced Microsoft as the winner of its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, worth some $10 billion. AWS was considered the favorite for the contract, but lost out to Microsoft’s bid. The company then launched a lawsuit and was granted a temporary injunction.
in the meantime, Microsoft has claimed that AWS has unfairly used the litigation process to uncover the details of Microsoft’s bid and then altered its own to be competitive. Despite the DOJ and DODinvestigation both concluding Microsoft’s win was just, Amazon has continued to litigate. The DOD has even warned it may have to abandon the JEDI contract, simply to move forward with migrating critical systems to the cloud, a process which the litigation has delayed for roughly a year and a half.
Despite such warnings, it appears the DOD isn’t quite ready to end its fight, as it has filed new paperwork in the case, an acknowledgement that the case could extend “into late October at the earliest,” according to GovConWire.
In the meantime, the Pentagon is still signaling it must move forward as soon as possible.
“The filing merely reflects the proposed schedule for further proceedings in the case,” Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Pentagon, said in a statement. “Nothing about this procedural filing changes our previous statements regarding our commitment to establish an enterprise cloud capability for the department — we hope through JEDI — but the DoD’s requirements transcend any one procurement.”