The Defense Department reaffirmed its decision to award Microsoft a $ 10 billion cloud computing contract after a reassessment.
The department said in a statement on Friday that it “determined that Microsoft’s proposal represents the best value for the government.”
The Pentagon has previously stated that it intends to rethink some aspects of the acquisition, including a bidder’s value proposition and elements of the online market following a legal challenge to the award by market leader Amazon.com.
The contract, known as the Joint Business Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, is valued at up to $ 10 billion over a decade.
A Microsoft spokesman said in a statement that the Pentagon confirmed that the company “offered the right technology and the best value. We are ready to get down to business ensuring that those who serve our country have access to this much needed technology. “
Amazon said in a blog post that the Pentagon’s reassessment was “nothing more than an attempt to validate a flawed, biased and politically corrupt decision.”
The Pentagon asked to review the cloud award after federal claims judge Patricia Campbell-Smith wrote in March that the Department of Defense may have misjudged part of Microsoft’s pricing proposal.
Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud unit, filed a lawsuit in November alleging that President Donald Trump’s political interference cost the company the deal. Amazon said in the lawsuit that the Defense Department did not judge its offer fairly because Trump viewed Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos as his “political enemy.”
As part of that lawsuit, Amazon argued that Microsoft’s offering did not meet the government’s requirement that the winner’s data storage be “highly accessible” in one of six possible pricing scenarios. The government argued that Amazon was raising “superficial labels above technical performance.”
Campbell-Smith said it was likely that Amazon’s “chances of receiving the award would have increased” were it not for the Pentagon’s mistakes in evaluating the pricing proposals. After the ruling, the government asked to review the contract and allow bidders to review the problematic part of that pricing scenario.
Judge Campbell-Smith has yet to rule on most of the merits of Amazon’s legal challenge. The court had halted proceedings in the case while the Pentagon reviewed its decision to award the deal to Microsoft.
Earlier this week, a US appeals court rejected Corp.’s legal challenge to fight its exclusion from the pursuit of the cloud computing settlement.
