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US President Donald Trump has expressed concern about the Pentagon’s JEDI contract. That’s what two insiders say about Bloomberg. The president has demanded more information to determine whether he should intervene or not.

The JEDI contract is a contract that the Pentagon awards to a single cloud provider to transfer the services of the Ministry of Defense to the cloud. Next month, the $10 billion contract is to go to one of two companies: Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft. AWS is considered a favourite.

Letters to Trump

Trump is said to have been recently informed of letters from Republican Congress members and military leaders expressing their concern that the terms of the contract forced a number of companies out of the bidding process. It includes Oracle, say the insiders.

Trump would be frustrated about this, because he wasn’t aware of the concerns. He asked his employees to show him the correspondence. Trump says he is interested in the circumstances of the bidding process, but does not indicate that he will prevent the contract from going to one of the two finalists.

Ron Johnson, chairman of Homeland Security in the Senate, confirms that he has discussed the contract with the US president. He wanted to know what the problems were, what our concerns were and Senator Marco Rubio confirms that he spoke with Trump about the contract.

Contested contract

The JEDI contract is now quite controversial. Various tech companies that took part in the bidding process claim that it is unusual for only one party to be awarded the contract. It was more logical when multiple providers were awarded the contract and a multi-cloud strategy was put in place.

Oracle recently lost a lawsuit concerning the Pentagon’s contract. Oracle stated that the race for the contract is unfair, because AWS would be favoured. There would also be a conflict of interest. However, the judge did not agree to this.

Oracle was also one of the companies that complained that only one party can win the contract. The judge did not express an opinion on whether or not this is allowed.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.