Microsoft secures $10bn JEDI cloud deal, beats Amazon

Bloomberg

Microsoft Corp has won the sought-after JEDI cloud computing contract with the Pentagon valued at as much as $10 billion over a decade, dealing a blow to the market leader, Amazon.com Inc, which had been the front-runner.
The decision, which was announced by the Defense Department, may be challenged by Amazon, according to a person familiar with the matter, because President Donald Trump weighed in on the bidding process. The terms of the competition were also hotly contested by another rival, Oracle Corp.
The Pentagon has said the cloud project, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, is intended to help bring American military technology into the modern era.
The Defense Department is investing in commercial cloud services, which host computing power and storage in remote data centres, to improve data security and speed up real-time sharing of information across the military.
The Pentagon said the contract was expected to be completed by 2029. Microsoft shares rose 0.6% to $140.73 last week.
Amazon, which won a lucrative cloud contract with the Central Intelligence Agency in 2013, was long seen to have the upper hand in the competition. But politics entered the picture. Trump has long been at odds with Amazon’s Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos.
Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which Trump claims has treated him unfairly in its coverage.
“We’re surprised about this conclusion,” said Douglas Stone, an Amazon spokesman. He added that the company was “the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion. We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure.”
Trump surprised the industry earlier this year when he openly questioned whether the contract was being competitively bid.
A new book by Guy Snodgrass, alleges that Trump, in the summer of 2018 Mattis to “screw Amazon” .