The US Department of Defense announced on Tuesday that it is canning the controversial JEDI contract that was meant to fund a cloud computing effort. The $10 billion contract will be replaced by a new procurement program that could see more than one provider contracted.
The new program has been named the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. The Department has determined that because of evolving requirements, increased cloud familiarity, and innovations in the industry, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets the ends it was created for.
Controversy
The DOD launched the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract as part of its efforts to modernize its infrastructure. The plan was for the Pentagon to move a majority of its internal apps to the public cloud platform for increased efficiency in operations.
The JEDI cloud contract was said to be worth as much as $10 billion over a decade. The DOD was expected by many to choose Amazon Web Services, which has seen remarkable growth and innovated heavily. However, they chose Microsoft’s Azure platform in 2019. The surprise decision led to an AWS challenge in court.
The outcome
The high-profile case was still in court as of earlier this year, with AWS arguing that awarding JEDI to Microsoft was influenced by political clout, which swayed the former president Donald Trump into awarding the contract to Azure.
As the case dragged on, signs came up that the DOD was starting to rethink its JEDI program. The report cited the legal battle as a hindrance to the progress of the JEDI cloud project. This decision to scrap the program saw AWS shares rise more than 4% on Tuesday, while Microsoft’s dipped slightly.
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