JEDI may be finished, but the cloud wars have just begun.
What you need to know
- Microsoft was awarded a cloud contract by the Pentagon back in 2019.
- Amazon contested the awarding process.
- Amazon's lawsuit has finally been dismissed now that Microsoft's contract has been canceled.
The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) saga that began in 2019 is finally over, now that a U.S. judge has dismissed the lawsuit Amazon launched in response to Microsoft winning the Pentagon's coveted cloud computing contract. Amazon posited that Microsoft's win was influenced by the Trump administration and waged legal warfare on the U.S. government until eventually, in July of 2021, the Pentagon decided it was in its best interest to scrap the whole contract and terminate its deal with Microsoft. Now, with no deal left to contest the winner of, Amazon is finally ready to let its lawsuit be dismissed.
As reported by Reuters, U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Patricia E. Campbell-Smith has dismissed Amazon's challenge at the request of the government. Amazon didn't argue the decision.
Even with the lawsuit over, it remains to be seen whether legal challenges will continue to mar the Pentagon's cloud operations. It has the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract coming up, and it's set to involve multiple cloud providers, potentially including both Microsoft and Amazon, so that no one company gets all the attention, money, and infrastructural inroads with the U.S. government's systems.
In our previous coverage of the JEDI contract's lengthy implosion, we asked experts what Microsoft's true losses were with its deal being terminated. By all accounts, the monetary aspect (which could've been upwards of $10 billion in revenue) was a negligible loss, and the short-term pitfalls of losing JEDI weren't all that big. But it remains to be seen if losing the sole driver's seat on establishing the Department of Defense's cloud infrastructure will have serious ramifications for Microsoft or if it'll be able to make up for any lost ground via JWCC, should it earn a spot on that contract.
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