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A federal court in the United States has dismissed an Oracle lawsuit. The company wanted the case to force the Pentagon to change the controversial JEDI contract.

The JEDI contract of the U.S. Department of Defense revolves around the cloud. The Ministry wants to transfer its internal infrastructure to the cloud over the next ten years, and it wants to choose one provider for that. That provider will receive a contract of 10 billion dollars (8.8 billion euros).

Several large cloud providers participated in the race for that contract, including Oracle. In December last year, however, the company started a lawsuit. According to Oracle, the process is unfair because it stretches Amazon Web Services (AWS). That would be contrary to federal law.

Pronunciation

Now it appears that the judge was not convinced of Oracle’s claims. The company cannot demonstrate prejudice in the procurement process because it did not meet the requirements to bid for the Pentagon’s contract, writes Silicon Angle.

There is also no conflict of interest, as the judge has decided. Oracle argued that three former Defence employees involved in JEDI had ties to AWS, which could jeopardise the integrity of the bidding process.

According to the court, however, there is no conflict of interest within the organisation and the individual conflicts of interest had no impact on the bidding process.

Single provider

Oracle was also angry that the JEDI contract was awarded to only one party. The company prefers the Pentagon to split up the contract and award it to several providers. This is also in line with the current trend in the cloud industry, where multicloud is considered to be the most modern.

The judge hasn’t said anything about this. This may change, however, because a more detailed assessment is still needed. A supportive opinion for the future shall also be made public.

AWS or Microsoft

Now that the verdict has been passed, the Ministry of Defence may award the contract to a company. At the moment only Microsoft and AWS are still in the race, although it is assumed that AWS will win the contract.

The decision is expected to be announced at the end of August.

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.