As predicted, Amazon officially submitted their protest of the Pentagon’s JEDI award to Microsoft. Citing ‘political influence,’ Amazon claims that there was a bias present in the Department of Defense’s award to Microsoft. Jim Williams, former acting GSA administrator and partner at Schambach & Williams Consulting, says that the amount of money being put into cloud architecture at DoD means that the outcome of this protest could change fortunes.
“When they talked about this JEDI being part of the overall defense strategy that has the general-purpose clouds and the fit for purpose clouds, there are a lot of fit for purpose clouds. GSA awarded on behalf of DoD the DEOS contract, and that would be email collaboration suites and that will sit on a different cloud infrastructure,” Williams said. “I think in terms of what DoD is looking for to take computing to the edge, supporting the war fighter, building upon the cloud infrastructure all the AI capabilities. You are talking about a lot of requirements that are going to flow in this direction. That amount of money doesn’t surprise me either.”
