Only Microsoft and Amazon are still competing for the Pentagon’s JEDI contract.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are the only two parties still competing for the JEDI contract from the U.S. Department of Defense. That’s what the ministry announced, says Bloomberg.

The Ministry of Defence wants to transfer its internal infrastructure to the cloud over the next ten years. It wants to choose one cloud provider, which gets a contract of 8.8 billion euros (10 billion dollars). Initially, several major cloud providers participated in the battle for the contract, but now there are only two left. Oracle and IBM are now out of the race. Elissa Smith, spokesman for the ministry, says that only AWS and Microsoft met the “minimum requirements”.

AWS and Microsoft have long been seen as the two most likely candidates for the project, especially as they already have higher federal security clearances. The intention was to choose a winner this month, but this has been postponed due to investigations and a court case. Smith now states that the winner will not be announced until mid-July at the earliest.

Oracle lawsuit

The Pentagon announced in January that it was investigating whether AWS was causing a conflict of interest by hiring a former employee of the Ministry of Defence. That employee, Deap Ubhi, is said to have led the project to bring the computer systems from the Pentagon to the cloud.

That information came up in the middle of a lawsuit with Oracle. That company started a lawsuit in December, claiming that certain employees of the Pentagon are biased against AWS. Two employees of the ministry are said to have links with AWS, the most serious accusation being made against Ubhi.

That trial has since been halted because new evidence has allegedly come to light. The nature of the evidence is unknown. The trial was halted so that the ministry has time to review the material.